If Thine Eye (work in progress)
If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. — Matthew 6:22–23
IF THINE EYE
A photograph has never been objective. The eye behind it is never clear. This work takes that condition as its subject.
If Thine Eye is an autobiographical project made in my hometown in the California desert using handmade colored acrylic filters placed in front of the camera lens. These filters are sculptural interventions that alter, color, and complicate the image before it reaches the film plane. They make visible what is always happening: the way inherited frameworks, religious, familial, and psychological, color perception before we have any say in the matter. Carl Jung called it projection, the way we cast our own unknown interior onto everything we see. The title draws from scripture, reinterpreted not as moral warning but as a description of the inescapable condition of subjective human experience. The language is inherited. So is the eye.
The filters began as an attempt at control. Desert conditions refused it. Wind tilted the acrylic, surfaces reflected unintended elements into the scene, the apparatus cut me. When the film came back, the failures were more interesting than anything I had planned. That became the work.
The photographs move between registers, the scorched and transcendent, earthly and withheld. Portraits of my close family appear alongside landscapes, objects, portals, and vernacular sacred spaces. The work is not documentary. It is symbolic, psychological, and deeply personal, treating autobiography not as subject but as access point.
This project is the direct evolution of A Poor Sort of Memory. Where that work asked what we remember and whether we can trust it, this one asks what shapes the eye that looks in the first place.
"Projection makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face." — Carl Jung