BFA Thesis Exhibition

Pratt Institute Photography Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Gallery Statement:

Devotion is not always gentle. It can take the form of repetition; returning to the same thoughts, the same memories, the same questions. It can become an obsession, an addiction, a cycle that is both sustaining and destructive. In this way, devotion is not separate from survival, but a way of enduring, of trying to understand, of transforming what was lived into something that can be seen.

Throughout my time at Pratt, I made work about my past and my emotions, but never with the clarity I was searching for. I eventually realized I wasn’t saying enough.

This project began with the understanding that context gives conceptual work its weight. To be direct, to name what shaped me, became necessary.

You Owe Me a Photograph is rooted in my experience growing up with a mother battling addiction. I was born dependent on the substances she was using, raised below the poverty line, and surrounded by environments that felt disconnected from my reality. These conditions have shaped a cycle in me: anger, depression, numbness, repeating continuously.

Joy, for me, has never been passive. It is something I have to consciously access, and I can only do that by naming what took it away. That process requires returning to these experiences again and again.

The loops in this work represent those patterns of thought. The prints act as moments of clarity; instances in which feeling became legible, and I could finally understand what I was experiencing.

The title You Owe Me a Photograph addresses systems that failed to hold, document, or make space for these experiences. It speaks to an absence of recognition and care of moments that were never fully seen or preserved. The work becomes a way of producing that evidence for myself—constructing a record where there wasn’t one.