My first studio was 3,000 square feet with sixteen-foot ceilings. This was a corner space with huge windows facing north and west on the top floor of a seven- story warehouse in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

My first work within this space consisted of cutting apart 35mm camera bodies and casting them in plaster, centered in a 8”x10” format. My method was quite simple: everything that was visible from a one-point perspective from the front and back was filed and ground to the surface. Whatever was visible from both the front and back was cut in half and mounted on each side. Once dry, the plaster was painted with white enamel to match photographic paper.

After this series I decided to go to a 16” x 20” format. This extra surface area enhanced their visual ambiguity. Both formats were successful in different ways but each accentuated the image’s vacillation between the second and third dimensions.

Always displayed as a diptych, the front and back suggest the two choices available in life. The directness of these works, literally reversing the function of the camera, simultaneously nullified and deified their presence in our culture. After more than three years of devotion to these icons, I turned my attention to sculpture.