About the Project

A.T. Work  (After Trump)

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I saw my work change after the 2016 election. As a result of the Trump presidency, I have become an immigration activist and my photographs have become more somber, less inferential, and less nostalgic. It is an attempt to hold some part of myself inviolate.

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I make non-objective drawings to use as props in photographs I stage. I want these images to have a sense of presence without an agenda. I want the act of viewing them to feel like a visual respite from the daily destructive clamoring.

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At the heart of my process is a desire to use light and space to create something that will exist only in a photograph. The images I make retain the artifice of their own construction. Ambiguity is embraced in the search for an integrity and a “feels right” resolution, and, hopefully, as an affirmation of positive human endeavoring.

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I recently saw the Ad Reinhardt show of blue paintings. There was a great quote of his that resonated:

                       

“Art as art is neither in this world nor out of this world. It takes us out of our everyday world and takes us in from otherworldliness. It is not fact made fancy nor fancy made fact, neither matter made mind or mind made matter. It is its own world, own fact, own fancy, own mind, own matter. Not spirit, not flesh, not sense, not nonsense.”

 

That’s what I am after as a way to persist and not give up.