Casting Call Exhibition

Casting Call Artist’s Statement

Every figure in Casting Call has been assembled, never simply photographed. A marble head auditions for a paparazzo's body. A fountain lion inherits a throat and a collar. A dress form takes vows it cannot speak. These are composite bodies—part mannequin, part flesh, stitched together in the same logic as a film crew building a character from wardrobe, wig, and understudy.

The title borrows from the audition process: the summons that precedes a role, before anyone has decided who gets the part, or whether the part is even human. Working with original photography and studio-built special effects, I fuse cast plaster, storefront plastic, and tailor's canvas with the faces and hands of people I know, blurring the line between the figure who performs a self and the figure built to hold one.

The results are neither portraits nor still lifes but something closer to casting sheets for a production that never opens—civic icons, saints, and department-store idols standing in for the roles we rehearse daily: witness, penitent, spectacle, ornament. Beneath the theatrical surface sits a quieter question, the one every mannequin poses without asking it: how much of identity is assembled, and how much is simply worn.

Artist's Note: None of the works in this collection was created through the use of AI. Each consists primarily of original photographs what were assembled in a digital photo editing program.