This portrait series is an exploration and celebration of people engaged in the process of activating one or more of their five senses including hearing, touch, sight, smell, taste.   As someone who has acute senses that at times overwhelm me with intensity, and even a sixth sense that is quite significant, I was interested in pursuing a project that would allow me make portraits of subjects with overlapping reactions to things that excited their senses. But what was most exciting to me in this project are the seconds in between frames when I was able to capture some very beautiful stillness in each individual, while they were unaware of the camera, during these multiple exposure takes. This is something I call the “stillness” of the “interiority of being.”

This project idea came about when I was using in-camera multiple exposure for another project and was struck by the beautiful and poignant variances in emotional reactions of the subjects I was working with in frames that were shot just seconds apart.  In that project, I was working with imagined stimuli, but I was curious how real stimuli could illicit a chain reaction of responses through touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight to be caught in multiple exposure in a single image over the course of seconds. 

Each subject was asked to pick objects from a large table filled with choices of fruit, candy, drinks, vessels, musical instruments, gloves, books, candles, textural fibers, and much more.  Over the course of each session, subjects were allowed to choose various items to explore in front of the camera in a relaxed environment. Each frame I made was witness to the sensory experience as it occurred over an extended period of a minute or less.

The result of this project contained many surprises that enhanced the pleasure of making the work as well as viewing it in all its complexity.  Many of the images are cubist in nature and speak to the near simultaneous sensations we are capable of feeling, while abstracting the portrait image to a point where the viewer must decide how to enter to the image and find their way around the various layers and depths.  The mental challenge to these images is the aspect that invites the viewer to participate in the image, stop and investigate it, and to ask questions that he or she must also answer as they navigate it.

Images in varying sizes including archival pigment prints in Sheet and Print are 16x20 or 24x30 print on 30x26 sheet, 3D 12 Block Installation Construction of 18" blocks making a 7'6" x 6' sculpture, and 12, 2" blocks making 8"x10"  sculpture, and two small 8"x2" towers composed of 2" square blocks, 38"x24" Diptychs, 6 Panel Fresco "Journey of the Senses"  (Each panel is 12 7/8 x 18 1/8)