Dispossession started with a quest for a single image. During the years I spent shooting at Renaissance Faires for my Romance project, I had this curious obsession to find the perfect picture of the Ren Faire’s stereotypical symbol: a giant turkey drumstick. In my case, I wanted to photograph a beastly drumstick, mostly eaten, jutting out of a trash can. Not that such a photo would have really fit in the parameters of the project, but none-the-less I spent many hours stalking the trash cans that adorn the grounds. With tens of thousands of visitors on a normal weekend, I should have expected an incomprehensible array of items, but it felt overwhelmed every time I sauntered over toward a garbage can I had to peer ever-closer until I was aiming my lens down the cylinder as though looking through a kaleidescope of crumpled brands, broken props, gnawed pseudo-period food, and other unfathomable curios. This project, rendered in large color prints, straddles the line between momento mori and monument filled with the darkly humorous, slightly nauseating, results of the acts of consumption and dispossession that are generated by humanity’s physical intrusion into these imagined lands.
