Detroit Series

2011 - 2017

My family left urban Detroit soon after I was born but later, as an adult, I was curious to see the east side neighborhood where my late grandmother had a beautiful little bungalow. I wanted to go back and see her house so around 2010, I talked one of my brothers into going with me. We went only to discover that the house had been torn down and there are only two houses left in a block of 30. It was like a field. You could walk miles and miles ... some were burnt out but there would be one or two houses every block.

This inspired me to explore the mass urban decay of the city I grew up in and reshape ruins of the stories left behind into what became this series. Over a period of five years, I snuck into abandoned buildings and I began photographing what I found. We’d go from floor to floor and there would still be envelopes and coffee cups and stuff left from the `70s. I think what happened is people refused to pay their gas and electric bills so they shut off the electricity and gas, the pipes froze, and destroyed it all.. Everything was left in time; it was surreal.

The series of art that came from these visits utilized fused and high fired glass techniques to evoke the urban ruin and peeling away of beauty, memories, and time. It remains one of my most personal projects as an artist, one that continues to inspire the work I do with displaced and marginalized communities.