At a time where our lives have become staged photo opportunities to be posted on Facebook, saved as screensavers, or tacked to our dorm room walls, I am ever intrigued by the way we recall our history. In a world so dominated by imagery, where do our memories fit? Which are more honest, more tangible, more everlasting? After discovering family snapshots taken of a time I can no longer remember, before the death of my brother Avery, I am most disturbed by the disjunction between this parallel history of images that exist separate from my memory.

My brother died when I was nine years old. He was six. When asked of my earliest memory I am immediately drawn to that night, looking out from my front window at the array of emergency vehicles illuminating our yard through the downpour of rain. As a painter of photographs, it would be easy for me to say that from that moment forward pictures were all I had left of him. But as our lives continued and our houses changed, these photographs slowly made their way into boxes and, until recently, never made their way out. Instead it was specific memories (our last conversation, the sound of his voice, his laugh that took up the space in my memory and home. The gravity of these moments, and the effort it took to preserve them, was just too great to allow room for anything else.

But I still find myself left with questions, doubt: Shouldn't a photograph last forever? Aren't memories constantly tricking and evading us? Which can I trust? Which is more fragile? Which is forever? My paintings, evolved from individual pictures, set out to navigate this uncertainty as I struggle to articulate my own relationship with photography in the wake of my brother's death. My images are blurred, smeared, or altogether empty in an attempt to reiterate the collapsing and reassembling of a moment and it's inevitably fleeting nature. I use the element of focus and visual clarity as a transcription of memory and progression of time. I allow my wood supports to show through, as the image and moment disintegrates. My panels are oversized and my figures - life-sized or larger, in an attempt for the emotional weight a 4"x 6" snapshot print inevitably lacks.

As a whole my work is a self-contained world of my history, a nostalgic realm in which my photographs and memories coexist. They exploit the painful absence that is the result of the presence of the image, and are the physical evidence provided for a moment against the otherwise haziness of my history. My paintings are an attempt to assimilate the contradictions and hesitations that remembering creates, and provide a sense of honesty amid my otherwise fraudulent past.

I approached this St. Mary's Project as an opportunity to set out to understand why I'm an artist, why I do what I do, and what type of artist I want to be in the future. In the end, my painting evolved into a channel for unspeakable emotions. It became my voice, in which I created a dialogue with the memories of my brother, Avery, and developed into an outlet for which I could finally make these unresolved experiences and untouched emotions tangible in a visual form of painting. This past May when I found out I had been selected to do a Studio Art SMP, the first thing I did was go out and a get myself a little leather-bound journal; I've never been a big fan of journals,they usually lose my interest by the second or third entry, but in this case it became an invaluable tool to get all of my thoughts on paper, and allowed me to constantly return to them for inspiration. I did however forget what I had written on the very first page, until just the other day when I sat down and began writing this speech: "Why do I paint people?" "What is my earliest memory?" And, "why have I never painted Avery?"

Perhaps if I had revisited this earlier, I would have arrived at my final set of works much sooner, but I was honestly shocked at how full-circle this experience had come. I had been worried that I was painting just to please my professors, playing some sort of random grab bag game trying to pick something they would like. In reality, I had been painting for myself all along. I was painting what I always needed to paint in order to understand my discomfort with images of my brother, and what for twelve years since my brother's death, I had been struggling to articulate and recognize.

My parents are divorced, and I realized in both of my houses, photographs of Avery were limited, to none. Why was he no longer present? Why had I never painted him? My memories of my childhood as a whole are simply a blur, except for the few days surrounding his death. I remember his last day, our last conversation, his funeral, and that particular stench of floral arrangements that littered our house for weeks afterwards), but it was as if everything else simply didn't matter, and the gravity of those moments was too great to allow room for anything else.

As I began exploring boxes of photographs of my childhood that had been stored away, searching for images to paint, it was as if every moment captured in these pictures was a new memory in itself. Although these images rarely brought me back to that specific moment, it was like looking into this other life, one that I have a hard time remembering ever existed. I was able to expand the visual library in my mind of moments with Avery, but I still had an unresolved relationship with photographs against what I can remember. Which was more honest? Which would last forever? My most recent works are my attempt to challenge this uncertainty and articulate them visually. The only thing I have realized is that nothing is forever, and inevitably, both a photograph and a memory, artifacts of our history, are constantly fleeting and deceiving us.