Waiting Spaces
2017-2018
digital photography

Waiting Spaces is a photographic series I began in 2017, after becoming a father for the first time. The lifestyle changes in our household were immediately apparent, particularly with regard to time. The sudden, drastic lack of opportunity to address even the most basic of (our own) human needs created a difficult transition for us as people, let alone artists. As a means of maintaining some level of creative activity, and thereby also hoping to cling to even the most limited level of access to the benefits to my mental health which I know to be afforded by such activity, I began a series of iPhone photos.

This series was executed in spare moments between frequent episodes of caregiving. The content consisted of mundane images from inside our home. These scenes were often played out in dimly lit rooms, and other liminal spaces and moments. I arrived at the concept of “waiting spaces” early on, as so much of my time during this early phase was spent sitting in a room … rocking the baby, waiting for him to fall asleep, sitting quietly, waiting for him to wake up, etc. Our home was comprised, essentially, of spaces made for waiting. In these contemplative moments of sleep-deprived derangement of the senses, I found myself, as usual, intrigued by the play of light and shadows, of shapes and forms, of mood and atmosphere, all within the context of the mundane environment around me. My attention to these kinds of images or scenes can be traced back directly to particular video projects I worked on in junior high and early high school. Mundanity has always been the most prominent focal point of my photographic and video work.

As a means of connecting this series of attempts to continue the creative process to something outside myself, I embarked on a daily exercise of posting some of them on my Instagram feed. For the better part of a year, I posted nothing but images from this series. Eventually I experimented with printing some of them. A small selection of those prints was included in the 2018 Kansas City Flatfile & Digitalfile at H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO.