West of Truth traces the myths embedded in the landscape of the American West, from Hollywood to the Four Corners. Roadside attractions, billboards, monuments, churches, strip clubs, and manufactured landscapes appear alongside open desert and mountain views. Old stories remain visible even as new ones accumulate.
I grew up in Los Angeles, where the American Dream often arrives with a glossy surface. Family road trips took me beyond it, along highways through small towns and vast landscapes where commerce and wilderness, aspiration and decline, the sacred and the profane sit side by side. I return to those roads looking for the places where myth and lived experience collide.
These photographs examine the West as both place and proposition: a landscape shaped by belief, reinvention, spectacle, and the stories America tells about itself.
I’m Fine, Everything’s Fine is a series of constructed still lifes made from the objects we reach for when the world feels unstable: food, medicine, packaging, flowers, liquor, talismans, household debris, and small rituals of control. Arranged against black, they become part altar, part evidence table, part vanitas.
The photographs consider the comforts we accumulate, the precautions we take, and the things we consume to reassure ourselves that everything is manageable. Humor and unease coexist. Beauty slips toward decay, protection toward futility, abundance toward waste.
The title is both reassurance and warning. These still lifes ask what we hold onto when the systems around us feel less certain, and what our objects reveal about the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep going.
Candles, Crystals, Iron Bear and Monkey Coin Holders, Snow Globe, Matches, Tarot Cards, Cups, Wand, Coins, Sword Letter Opener
Tequila Bottles, Lemons, Limes, Ladybugs, Jigger, Silver Bowl
Black Cat, Dead Bird, Feathers, Bobcat Skull
Birds’ Nests (Twigs, Grass, Straw Wrapper), Ostrich Egg, Two-Headed Duckling
Ceramic Vase, Flowers, Leaves
Watermelon, Mango, Strawberries, Letter Opener, Egg, Porcelain Cups, Lipstick, Tissues, Marker
Cat, Globe, Finch, Ceramic Plate
Hamburger, Fries, Ketchup, Cheetos, Diet Coke Cans, Straw, Pink Bismuth, Paper Napkins
My earliest books were ancient myths and legends, which I memorized by heart. Many of those stories were framed as warnings. Their archetypes endure, shaping identity, expectation, and consequence in ways most people no longer recognize as mythological. These stories function like hidden instructions still running in the background of modern culture.
Inspired by recent literary works, such as Circe and Stone Blind, which restore voice to women once peripheral or silenced, I began questioning which stories I had accepted, and whose perspectives had shaped me.
These portraits recognize those legacies while refusing their conclusions. Some employ tonal inversion, where light works against its usual logic, upending convention and offering another way of seeing. Across the series, women are present on their own terms, and one can imagine that the endings of their stories are not yet written.
