Artist’s Notes

Following an old art tradition, the photographic sketch is an essential aspect of my creative process, particularly important during the early stages of developing a project. Sketching is for me an intuitive practice of making images without a conscious intention, focusing on seeing, feeling, and reflecting on the experience. It is a medium that allows me to discover and elucidate pictorially the order I create out of my encounters with the seen and unseen. 

Many of the images selected for this section were made in various cities in the province of Barcelona, Spain. I chose these places out of a personal interest in visiting the home of the Sephardic Jews during the "medieval period." Upon returning from my travels, I had a dream about the city of Girona, the place where one of the most prominent Jewish communities in Spain lived during the 14th century. This ignited my interest in the subject of the diaspora as a possible project to develop. As it often happens, at the beginning of a new work, a poem surfaced from the dream and I began to make images in the studio to capture the emerging ideas.

In organizing the sketches, my intention is to present a group of photographs that reflect two related interests that I continue to investigate and that may become formal bodies of work. One of them is my fascination with organic processes in nature, man-made objects, and structures as they change over time. I am drawn to the seemingly inherited aesthetic organization of the random and impermanent and to the beauty found in the demise of all matter. The other is my desire to acknowledge photographically the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews. I hope to convey in a poetical narrative, without hostility or blame, that these happenings of historical relevance continue to take place across nationalities, religions, and ethnic groups and that they affect and shape our destiny 

With this work, my eye is pointed toward the phenomenon of time and its transmutative force on nature and humanity and on remembering and recognizing the importance of the past in our personal and collective experiences. I am in search of what remains, the vestiges of the history of everything.