These pictures are taken with a camera that is, by most definitions, broken: an old Polaroid SX-70 camera that I rescued from a yard sale.

With its first use I realized the camera wasn’t functioning properly. It sometimes spills out 2 pictures at a time and the film often gets stuck in the gears, exposing and mangling them in unpredictable ways. I've figured out how to control and accentuate aspects of the camera's flaws but the images themselves are always a surprise. Each one is determined by the idiosyncrasies of the film and the camera.

I am impressed with the old technology’s resilience. This Polaroid camera is broken, by chance, in a way that is productive but the flaw that has given it that extra dimension has also robbed it of its initial purpose. When the narrative and depictive elements are nearly removed from the photographs one can concentrate on the details of its abstraction. Any representational remnants of the original image as well as any hint of the will of the photographer become recontextualized inside this new dynamic.

Instantaneous, cheap and ubiquitous digital photography has long since replaced Polaroid film. In doing so it’s rendered the old technology antiquated for conventional image making. What Ruined Polaroids offers is a picture of the Polaroid process itself frozen in time and plucked out of the camera mid-gesture.

As a photographer who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, I developed a great reverence for film. It’s therefore odd for me to find myself destroying 100 rolls of 120 color negative film from an abandoned photographic project. In the project I’m destroying, I photographed seemingly blank walls looking for shapes and patterns barely visible to the naked eye. I scanned the negatives digitally and raised the contrast to reveal the hidden subtle forms. I became frustrated with the process of scanning film to digital. The files were filled with digital quirks and flaws that brought out physical characteristics of the negatives rather than the photographs. It occurred to me to follow that route and show the negative almost exclusively.

The film is the vehicle for our images. We carefully clean off the dust and avoid fingerprints and scratches. We want the surface of our negatives to be silent. I want to reconsider the traditional process of shooting, processing and printing film. I fold, crumple and slice the film, often randomly, to emphasize its sculptural elements. I make these fractures interrupt the frames of the images trapped in the film’s emulsion like a fly in amber. I’m making the old project participate in it’s own destruction and rebirth this time as an image and an object. I’m using the flatbed scanner that failed me in the abandoned project to photograph the film again. The film’s surface reflects the illuminating digital eye of the scanner back into itself, conveying the experience of being seen

An image captured on film, destined never to be seen and made useless for traditional printing, has had it’s purpose subverted. However, being freed from photographic concerns, it’s released from intentions, expectations and the shackles of memory.

Brooklyn’s Gowanus canal is one of America’s most polluted waterways. More than a century of unfettered industrial abuse was followed by decades of bungled attempts to clean it up. It is significantly cleaner than it was 30 years ago but it’s contaminated waters hold the evidence of it’s history.

To look into the Gowanus canal is to gaze into the eyes of a corpse. It is murky and clouded over but if you look closely you can see life and light reflected in the mercury, feces and coal tar that drift in the canal like malevolent clouds. There’s a lot of mistaken perspectives like the confusion of looking down to see the sun. I'm trying to wade, visually, into the space between water, shit and the sky.

There's something about this that reminds me of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych "The Last Judgment" (1482). In it we witness a dark, terrifying scene of hell on earth. The judged are tortured and murdered by a host of nightmarish figures while above them, god and angels with trumpets, float in a beam of light and blue sky. In one detail of the painting, the damned are being chased into a river by dragons and thrown off of a bridge by strange frog people. I keep imagining that when they're dropping head first into that terrible water they unexpectedly catch a glimpse of god and that blue sky reflected in the black water below them and for one second imagine themselves falling down into heaven.

In this work I regard the flatbed scanner as a kind of clunky digital camera that takes photographs one sliver at a time over the course of several minutes. In A Form Rut I take that prolonged exposure as an opportunity to explore the misuse of this technology. During a pass, I take the source material (in this case I’m engaging with the covers of Artforum magazine, giving my project it’s anagrammed name) and turn it by hand in a number of choreographed patterns and moves. Those moves are combined with pauses that are counted out loud or in time with music. With each movement and pause the image is sliced from different angles and in varying sizes, each landing haphazardly on the last. The inner workings of the scanner are revealed in the red, green and blue streaks that appear when the object is moved in front of the scanner head. Despite the fact that this scanner is an instrument of reproduction built for stillness, it can convey time and motion in a way that’s particular to its mechanics. The result is a visual anagram reminiscent of a collage but made from a single pass or “exposure” of the scanner.