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

I picture the Earth 

think i     n          g

turning–

being,

absence,

loss

Years on 

I carry,

wherever I go,

Your echo

Ayngel emerged from a chance encounter at a gas-station late one June evening in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

This decade-long body of work investigates the emotional, material, and transformative potentials of human connection. Photographs range from portraiture, still-life, and landscape, to appropriated imagery and diaristic texts. The work intertwines documentary and fiction to explore themes of self-actualization, identity, family, labor, mental-health, and memory. In the process, timelines and identities between subject and artist merge, fracture, and reassemble, highlighting the slippery and fragmentary nature of photographic depiction. 

Ayngel is a gesture of love, reflecting on the value and myriad potentials to be discovered through human connection. In our contemporary climate of exceeding social, emotional, and political instability, reaching out feels all the more essential.