"Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: The foreignness of what you no longer are or nor longer poses lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places… " (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
In 2014 I began to work directly inside hotels, constructing ephemeral site-specific installations using only the furniture and objects contained in the rooms I occupied. The installations transform the generic interiors of these rooms into theaters where latent narratives are secretly enacted and dormant energies released. After the installations are documented they are dismantled and the rooms returned to their original condition. The resulting photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpires during my stay. For me, this work has become not only a way of revisiting the early displacement of my childhood, but of confronting the larger enigma of the hotel as a temporary home.
Excerpt from A Room for the Night,
Radius Books, 2023