the space in between exists as a place to write about life, art, education, social issues and culture—free from editorial oversight, word counts or hot takes. It's a form that exists somewhere between a commonplace book and more polished, finished writing. It's a place where I am encouraged to write rather than pressured to.
I began writing online in 2002, at this very URL, and over the years my writing has appeared on Medium as the S.P.E.'s editor of exposure, in Hyperallergic, DARIA art magazine and First American Art Magazine.
My formative years were spent in Chattanooga, Tennessee—but because my father was a white guy from Akron, Ohio and my mother was a Filipino immigrant, you will detect no southern twang in my voice. I spent the last half of high school in a building that Samuel L. Jackson also had his secondary educational experience in and across the street from the school was a confederate cemetery, and a bit beyond that, the University of Tennessee.
Prior to my entry into the world, my formerly Catholic parents were “born again” and became fervent evangelicals. I was raised under the doctrine of James Dobson, and books with titles like “The Strong-willed Child” comprised my parents’ notions of child-rearing. Chick tracts, the Satanic Panic and going to church three times a week was my normal. I began to become suspicious of this top-down theology at 12. Intensely sheltered by paranoid parents, I read my way into other worlds and into the notion that there were definitely other realities than the one I was in. I moved out of their home the week of my 18th birthday.
I had only been to one museum in my entire life prior to 18, and that was the “Ramses the Great” exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Natural History when I was 14. Newly liberated, I went to New York City for the first time on a school trip and experienced exquisite delirium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial where we were given little black entry pins that read:
I remember being transported by the Temple of Dendur, mesmerized by Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale and scandalized by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos from The Black Book, with overheard commentary by Glenn Ligon.
I took my first photography class soon after.
The kind of work that I make now revolves around stories about stories. Sometimes the stories are my own, sometimes they are multiple versions of those same stories, told as if happening in parallel universes. I love other people’s stories too, and being able to elide my story within a larger compilation of those. That is what my series #exvangelical is about. I’m now in middle age, with both of my parents deceased, and I have an eleven-year-old daughter. I am interested in origin stories, and how they expand and contract based on who’s doing the telling, how many times it’s been told, and how the story shifts based on the teller’s shifting relationship to themselves. I’ve begun to make images about the stories I’ve been told, especially by my parents, and the images both re-enact those stories while also questioning their veracity.
For the past ten years, I’ve been teaching art at a university very much like the kind that I went to in Chattanooga. My students are diverse in age, race, class and gender identity. Most of them work 30 hours or more a week, like I did, and for many of them their horizon line ends at the city limits. They have life experience and hardships and stories to tell, and I take it as my job to get them to find those narratives and understand why they are worth sharing visually. When I strike a nerve with them, those horizon lines expand beyond state lines, the mountain west, the northern hemisphere. I love the reciprocal dynamics in teaching. They teach me continually as I teach them, on a continuum from banal to profound. Speaking of the former, one day I'll make a zine of all the Gen-Z vernacular that I need them to clarify what it is that means. The latest one was "lore dump."
Welcome to the space in between. Sign up to receive posts for free and/or, if you want to support my writing with a paid membership, or a one-time donation, it will go into my photobook savings account—which is continually being depleted—or my learn-something-new-workshop account. Thank you for reading.