Sorry, no vacancy

Sorry, No Vacancy reveals a parallel universe where the realm of the imaginary spreads itself as a fine netting over the peripheral world. In this work I continue to use my own image as protagonist in a world where external reality is ripe with strange and mysterious juxtapositions and scenarios. Sorry, No Vacancy combines the ineffable with the vast and isolated spaces of Southwest Texas. The settings for this series are marginal and transient sites; remote highways, abandoned tourist stops, and lonesome towns that seem to hover over the landscape as ghost images of a past time. These sites become the grounds where I perform my cryptic rituals of self-transformation. The photos recall cinematic and collective imagery that spans American screen iconography, mythology and folklore. Their referents are themselves representations, thus creating a spiral of auto-referential signs where images recall other images ad-infinitum; a mirroring structure where the tension between reality and its referent is difficult to delineate. The work forges a link between the real with the symbolic and imaginary, where the possible is reflected in the impermanent states that I have recorded with the camera. In the words of Andre Bazin, "Making images today,...is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny".