Philly 100 consists of one hundred works made in winter/spring 2022 when I moved to Philadelphia to explore a new city. I set myself the demanding task of creating one piece per day, six by six inches. With it I documented friends and strangers, and the forming and shifting of community. I examined the compression that came from the built environment and the magnetism of the natural world. The work served as a sounding board during a time of relative isolation, in which I was able to see what I needed most by noticing what I was gravitating towards. This series was both cathartic to make, as I settled into my art practice, and strenuous, as I confronted my own relationship to productivity.
These works were presented as part of my solo show, ALL AND NOTHING. The show sprang from intense bouts of making art, amidst broader landscapes of creative drought. This polarity of my own art practice is referenced in the fragile and uncompromising medium of cut paper. The collection serves as a documentary of building relationships to place and to self. The title ‘ALL AND NOTHING’ in part alludes to the process in which the cutting away, the negative space, the ‘nothing’ is what makes the image whole.
