I realized that you may not be familiar with my background, so I will just take a moment to share how I got to where I am today... 

I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and began making art when I was around 17 years old. I started with pretty much nothing, and no formal training. My grades were shot, and I wasn’t supposed to graduate high school. I literally drew a smiley face on my SAT’s. I was also very sick with an eating disorder throughout high school, and I had developed debilitating pain with endometriosis (which I later healed myself of and wrote a book about). I just woke up one day and I wanted to draw. And I could. Like I had been doing it for years. It just came out of me. I became obsessed with light and shadow.  How the light defines the shadow and the shadow emphasizes the light.  These ideas showed up not only in my photography, but in my life.  I learned that you must embrace the shadow to experience the light. 

My high school, fortunately, had a darkroom and I began making my own pinhole cameras. The photography teacher there, Ms. Lisa Holder taught me the foundation for everything I know today and had an incredible impact on my advancement. With her help, I made a portfolio and as a “long-shot attempt” applied to SCAD-Atlanta. Even though I really only had about a year and a half’s worth of education & artwork, I was accepted with a scholarship.  

SCAD-Atlanta is where I really launched into where I am today. I completed my Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in photography and continued to complete my Masters (MA) of photography in just one year. While I was there, I developed my own photographic process with scanography. The process I invented started as a mockery of digital photography because I was so pisssed about the digital 'takeover'. It also served as a technical tool to help express some of the concepts my work centered around with ballet which was a huge part of my life growing up. When I decided to make work about my experience in the world of ballet, I thought of the contradicting ideas of degradation, restriction and freedom. Being constrained by the scanner for these projects, as well as the degrading aspects of digital manipulation, I was able to translate the ‘aesthetic experience’ of ballet into a degraded, virtual one. This allowed people to see a perspective from someone on the inside looking out, instead of the outside world trying to look inward. I wanted the subject to become the ‘negative’ which related to these ideas technically and conceptually. 

In older forms of photography, the glass served as the negative, or served as the transfer medium sometimes with paper positives, etc. The process of putting people under glass and having them press different parts of their body up to it in order to achieve focus & depth allowed me to expand on the foundations of photography and experiment with their role in the digital world. Also, the speed at which I move the scanner and the different combinations of light used to achieve a certain look directly related back to my early teachings of photography as the simple scientific and artistic combination of two things: light and time.

After graduating, I quickly realized the difficulty in pursuing these practices & a career in art. I worked a slew of jobs just trying to survive and fuel my work. Most of the time 3 jobs at a time—selling AT&T door to door, waitressing & night shift stock at Michael’s just to name a few. I finally was able eventually to get some commercial photography jobs shooting product photography at Liberator and Amazon (fabric.com) as well as various art reproduction & print labs. The last job I had before I decided to start my own business was at PPR (professional photo resources). I rented photo equipment to people every day that needed gear for the job they had been hired for and had no idea how to even work a camera. We would show them sometimes how to just take a picture. I made an important realization. I realized if someone is paying these people and they can support themselves with photography and are working for themselves—what the hell am I doing standing here behind the counter with a Masters degree?

I knew that I could no longer work for anyone else. I decided “It’s not over until I win”. I then combined all of my sales knowledge from my slew of jobs I had previously, reached out to everyone that viewed me in a positive light, and got to work. I wasn’t ready, but I just swung the bat and continue to swing. I continue to educate myself creatively & financially as not just an artist, but an entrepreneur. 

And that's where YOU come in.

As an artist, there's no guidebook for what I do. Often no matter how hard you work and how talented you are, it doesn't always cut it on the path to art-stardom or even just financial survival/success. No one achieves anything alone. It takes a tribe of caring patrons with impeccable taste (yes, YOU!) to make that big, big dream lift off the ground. So from the girl who went straight into waitressing at Red Pepper Taqueria when she graduated with her shiny Master's degree in 2012... to the badass who sits here writing this email with nothing but gratitude for the opportunity she has to make a living creating art...Thank You. 

I hope you truly know how much I appreciate every hard earned penny you invest in me. And how much I appreciate you taking my life's work and putting your own meaning behind it. When a piece of mine comes into your home or business it then becomes OUR story. Because art is not what you see, but what you make others see...

See yourself for who you really are.