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Monarch Butterfly & Caterpillars Along the Grand River, 2025
Darkroom 2024 Viewable on Etsy
ERASED Film Series
This ongoing series explores how an adoption (or abduction) impacted a family.
Polaroid 2025
Film Stills 2025
35mm Film 2007
ViViAN MAiER's PLA$TiC
"shame"
-John Maloof, Oscar Nominee
ViViAN MAiER’s PLa$TiC is a lens- and time-based multimedia series that defiantly recontextualizes famed “Chicago nanny photographer” Vivian Maier’s original negatives to examine authorship, ownership, and ethics. In the lineage of appropriation artists like Sherrie Levine, the works materially transform the original images through heat, abrasives, chemicals, and other interventions. To confront a gallery system and consumer culture that are synthetic, commodified, and disposable, the negatives’ industrial plastic base has been melted.
I purchased the negatives on eBay (2008 - 2009) and worked with them for years without knowing the photographer’s identity. In 2016, a friend recognized Vivian Maier in several self-portraits. After viewing Finding Vivian Maier, I met with director and Maier authority John Maloof on March 8, 2017, to authenticate and appraise the 1,300+ medium-format negatives (the ARTHoLE Collection). Maloof estimated them at about $1 per image and made an immediate purchase offer, which I declined.
Vivian Maier’s renowned photographs are sold through the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, under Non-Disclosure Agreements granting exclusive printing and sales rights to the gallery and John Maloof. Prints typically sell for $3,500 - $6,000. I declined to sign an NDA with the Estate.
This series has drawn sharp backlash from John Maloof and the Vivian Maier Estate, including threatening emails asserting their claims and harassing messages insisting all Maier negatives should be under Maloof's sole control - an assertion I reject. Everything is PLa$TiC.
I purchased the negatives on eBay (2008 - 2009) and worked with them for years without knowing the photographer’s identity. In 2016, a friend recognized Vivian Maier in several self-portraits. After viewing Finding Vivian Maier, I met with director and Maier authority John Maloof on March 8, 2017, to authenticate and appraise the 1,300+ medium-format negatives (the ARTHoLE Collection). Maloof estimated them at about $1 per image and made an immediate purchase offer, which I declined.
Vivian Maier’s renowned photographs are sold through the prestigious Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, under Non-Disclosure Agreements granting exclusive printing and sales rights to the gallery and John Maloof. Prints typically sell for $3,500 - $6,000. I declined to sign an NDA with the Estate.
This series has drawn sharp backlash from John Maloof and the Vivian Maier Estate, including threatening emails asserting their claims and harassing messages insisting all Maier negatives should be under Maloof's sole control - an assertion I reject. Everything is PLa$TiC.
