Oregon Statement
I began this series as I woke from a dream. It was early in the morning - at the end of night really. My sister and I had driven to the coast of Oregon, but were forced to take an alternate route when a major road was rained out with massive mud-slides on the highway. We got a hotel when we reached the coast late at night, not knowing exactly where the hotel was. Oddly, it turned out to be in Reedsport, the town we think of as our hometown. We had lived there from the time I was only a few months old. Before knowing that, I ran out to shoot in the early morning fog and thus began my series, “Oregon”.
This series expresses my mixed feelings about my childhood. I joke that you can tell from this series that I didn’t have a very happy childhood. However, it all happened within the incredible beauty of the Oregon coastline. So I express the mixed feelings of pain and beauty and the smashup of both within these photographic images. This series and so much of my work convey my complex feelings about my origins and the world – that the light and dark coexist, but in the end they can live together harmoniously and create beauty.