There are certain types of buildings that fascinate me.

  Churches seem to have a particular grandeur and stillness to them. No doubt this comes from millennia of conscious and unconscious intention.

  I respond to libraries in a similar way, although the nature of the contained communication is of a more intimate variety. They evoke a feeling of being inside a vault of humanities treasures.

  Classrooms evoke this sense as well.

  All of these are places where people congregate, where social groups communicate. They are like stages for the scenes of life’s instruction, but when the crowds disperse and there is no audience, the stillness is palpable. It is here that I begin to reflect on the nature of these places.

  The role of communication is of particular interest to me. I mean this in the bare-bones sense of physics. How does one elements position in space, time, and it’s velocity relate how it senses it’s surrounding world? Adding the human condition into this equation and the parallels that can be seen in social contexts creates an exponential level of intrigue.

  This series of photographs depicts written and visual communication removed from its context and presented as remnants. Each image is of a found fragment of message, or overlapping messages, left on blackboards in various educational institutions.

  By isolating these fragments from their context, one can read into them as messages in a void. Somewhat like my earlier natural abstraction works, these human-generated fossils read as monologues, defining themselves to each viewer. The marks recorded illuminate where the written language and illustration overlap, perhaps hearkening to a more “natural“ form of communication.

  The darkness from where the scrawls emerge suggests the unknown. It is in such voids that our minds begin to project out of uneasiness. Unable to quiet the constant processing of pattern recognition and scanning for meaning our minds inevitably end up projecting meaning via feedback when presented with a lack of stimulation. Where there is nothing we see inside ourselves. Where little information is communicated, we inevitably will devise our own unique extrapolations.

  Like much of my work, the photographs in Pi give the viewer half the story. By removing the message from their context and leaving them incomplete, I am interested in how the viewer projects their own narrative in effort to create their own coherent meaning.