The word valence comes from the Latin “valentia,” meaning power, potential, capacity to combine or effect change. From its roots,... Read More
The word valence comes from the Latin “valentia,” meaning power, potential, capacity to combine or effect change. From its roots, we get the word valiant, for courage and worth. When something carries more than one meaning, we use the word ambivalent, which collapses multiplicity into inertia. Multivalent suggests something else: a multiplying of capacity, potential for complexity that resists reductive erasures.
Multivalent is a series of constructed tableaux shot on large format film in single exposures. The moments that the images capture do not propose a single story to be deciphered; they stage encounters rather than conclusions.
The classical still life is a taxonomy, a system of classification that arranges the world into surfaces, species, vessels, and signs bearing inherited symbolism. But meaning is not inherent. And symbolism is not universal, it is cultural and often deeply personal. What might the rose mean if it were not just a symbol of love?
Objects carry their own layered histories, while viewers bring their own associations. Like a chemical element with many valences, meanings combine with our own experiences. Meaning becomes contingent, shaped by context, memory, and proximity.
Materials hold charge, they carry tensions and contradictions. A rope can pull you to safety or constrict you, armor can signal both protection and violence, we use lines to connect and to refuse. We allow objects these multiplicities more easily than we allow them in each other, or in ourselves.
This work is interested in how we practice meaning-making when we cannot defer to author or history; in how rituals of seeing exist in the quiet ways we interpret even ordinary objects. How might we place ourselves and each other in the open ground that story offers. How might objects become vessels for resonance, or tell stories that extend beyond the frame like an ellipsis.
