Photographs have been used to catalogue, examine, and document since the days of Henry Fox Talbot's photographic experiments in the mid-nineteenth century. These suites of images use photography to dissect language and reference the elements of scientific and analytical examination. Using anagrams and colloquialisms as a point of departure, common or insignificant objects are taken out of their everyday surroundings and placed on display in conjunction with other objects for contemplation as a whole.

The photograph, "Gravity", is an exercise in word deconstruction, tossing aside literal meaning in favor of pictorial entropy. I have taken a scientific concept, gravity, and connected it with the man most closely associated with the law of universal gravitation, Isaac Newton. I then broke down his name through the use of anagram which generated the words "tea", "swan", and "coin". I sorted the words into their common scientific names, and divided those into a larger category, kingdom. The kingdoms fall along the lines of vegetable, animal, and mineral, categories which encompass a majority of the natural world.

These images have the ability to circumvent the hierarchy of words and pictures. Headless animal crackers look ready for dissection. A sea of faces become a sociological study. A small shoe is bagged as evidence of an unknown occurrence. The end result are photographs that have meaning beyond the sum of their parts, creating an unlikely juxtaposition of playful dissection and studied construction.

Melancholy Once Removed: my MFA thesis work
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