Collect/Disperse

This master’s report is a discussion of the body of work that has come into realization during my last three years of study. As an artist I am interested in collectivity and the entropy of people, places, and objects. I use my training as a photographer as a foundation and a way to look at the world. It is the poetics and complexities of places and people that drive my art work and which have inspired me to expand my practice beyond photography. I write about my creative work in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I have been performing and photographing a site-specific project, Collect/ Disperse, for the past three years. My work deals both with stewardship for the land in the form of a historic family property, and care-taking for an individual whose compulsive collecting habit uniquely connects to the history of the place. The current iteration of Collect/Disperse is responding to the rising water line and loss of history due to encroaching gentrification.