Stay on your guard, Joe.
Anyone who dismisses you
Dismiss them promptly,
Permanently, and
Without recollection
Don’t compromise on what matters to you
Keep active
Do not cultivate the uninterested
Do not accommodate them
Keep away from them
Do not work for them
or, with them
Don’t get lost.
Traveling deeper in the night
I picture the Earth
think i n g
turning–
being,
absence,
loss
Years on
I carry–
wherever I go,
Your echo
Ayngel investigates the transformative affects evolving from a single chance encounter between myself and Ayngel at a gas station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts late in the evening of June 13, 2013.
Over the subsequent four years, I traveled north from New York City to Boston to spend time visiting with Ayngel. Initially, I shadowed him during his night shifts working the gas station. Within time, I was visiting with Ay at home and around his local community. Conversations shed light on artistic aspirations, creative community and family (the loss of the two), and struggles with American healthcare, job security, and mental health. From our first encounter, I found myself absorbed within his world, identifying in our relationship something akin to family, frequently encountering characteristics approximating and/or mirroring my own attributes and challenges to self-actualize. My intentions were always friendship, but as an artist I was certainly contending with a desire to make pictures of our experiences. Our visits were unscripted and spontaneous, and making pictures felt important. These photographs made on film range from portraiture, still-life, and landscape, to shared archival imagery, cell-phone images, and diaristic texts.
While this work is grounded in documentary practice, subjectivity and fiction intertwine raising questions regarding representation, self-fulfillment, and masculinity as shaped through labor, capital, and American history. “Ayngel” is an adopted alias, embodied by both subject and artist, speaking to identities in-flux, transformation, and growth. In the process of assembling this work, timelines and identities merge, fracture, and reassemble, as I grapple with how to portray Ayngel and our relationship. Throughout, I have worked with great care to bring him dignity, communicating my intentions and inviting collaboration in the creation of images and texts.
Ayngel is a gesture of love, a challenge to preconceptions, a form of self-reflexive-portraiture, a meditation on extended family and friendship, and living material reflecting on the importance of human connection. In our contemporary climate of exceeding isolation and political, social, and emotional instability, striking up a conversation, asking questions, and listening with care, feels all the more essential.
A monograph of Ayngel will be published by Trespasser early 2024.
Stay on your guard, Joe.
Anyone who dismisses you
Dismiss them promptly,
Permanently, and
Without recollection
Don’t compromise on what matters to you
Keep active
Do not cultivate the uninterested
Do not accommodate them
Keep away from them
Do not work for them
or, with them
Don’t get lost.
Traveling deeper in the night
I picture the Earth
think i n g
turning–
being,
absence,
loss
Years on
I carry–
wherever I go,
Your echo
Ayngel investigates the transformative affects evolving from a single chance encounter between myself and Ayngel at a gas station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts late in the evening of June 13, 2013.
Over the subsequent four years, I traveled north from New York City to Boston to spend time visiting with Ayngel. Initially, I shadowed him during his night shifts working the gas station. Within time, I was visiting with Ay at home and around his local community. Conversations shed light on artistic aspirations, creative community and family (the loss of the two), and struggles with American healthcare, job security, and mental health. From our first encounter, I found myself absorbed within his world, identifying in our relationship something akin to family, frequently encountering characteristics approximating and/or mirroring my own attributes and challenges to self-actualize. My intentions were always friendship, but as an artist I was certainly contending with a desire to make pictures of our experiences. Our visits were unscripted and spontaneous, and making pictures felt important. These photographs made on film range from portraiture, still-life, and landscape, to shared archival imagery, cell-phone images, and diaristic texts.
While this work is grounded in documentary practice, subjectivity and fiction intertwine raising questions regarding representation, self-fulfillment, and masculinity as shaped through labor, capital, and American history. “Ayngel” is an adopted alias, embodied by both subject and artist, speaking to identities in-flux, transformation, and growth. In the process of assembling this work, timelines and identities merge, fracture, and reassemble, as I grapple with how to portray Ayngel and our relationship. Throughout, I have worked with great care to bring him dignity, communicating my intentions and inviting collaboration in the creation of images and texts.
Ayngel is a gesture of love, a challenge to preconceptions, a form of self-reflexive-portraiture, a meditation on extended family and friendship, and living material reflecting on the importance of human connection. In our contemporary climate of exceeding isolation and political, social, and emotional instability, striking up a conversation, asking questions, and listening with care, feels all the more essential.
A monograph of Ayngel will be published by Trespasser early 2024.