There’s No Use Leaving uses self-portraiture staged within familiar and found domestic scenes (my childhood porch, my mother’s bathroom, a neighbor’s yard) lit with artificial light that, literally, casts them in a different light. The work examines the tension between individualism, isolation, and collective consciousness: how social, economic, and political structures shape behavior, how we enforce or resist them, and how we define ourselves within the bounds of our own circumstances and perception. I’m staging scenes where my past self once was, occupying the same space without ever fully sharing it. Someone is visible but not quite present, staying somewhere they can no longer be sure they chose.

Texts That Shaped The Work:
When McKinsey Comes to Town
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Play It As It Lays
The Chaos Machine
Phenomenology of Perception
Draw Your Weapons

Hedda Gabler