Mirages: Exhibited -Â Gentrified Summer 2023
I grew up in Talbot County, a place that feels like it has been sitting on the edge of time, watching the years crawl by. The roads wind through pines and red clay, past homes half-swallowed by vines, where the echoes of laughter and prayer still seem to hang in the air. It is a place that teaches you about endings, about what happens when people fade but their places remain.
When my father retired, we moved into poor neighborhoods throughout Columbus, Georgia, areas shaped by poverty and later consumed by gentrification. I watched homes demolished, legacies forgotten, and the quiet cry of the past being overwritten by the push for profit. The lives of people deemed irrelevant were paved over, their histories erased to make way for something shinier, cleaner, and emptier. Those neighborhoods carried the same haunted silence I remembered from the countryside—only this time, it was people, not just nature, doing the erasing.
Growing up in those shifting landscapes taught me something about life, loss, and the quiet persistence of time. Abandoned houses with curtains still hanging, cluttered yards where vines twist through rusted toys, churchyards where the elders talked of death as if it was a bill collector returning to collect. I watched time reclaim everything and everyone, slow and certain, until all that was left were traces, specks of humanity scattered across forgotten rooms and overgrown fields.
My work is a reflection of that quiet haunting. The photographs capture not just decay, but the residue of existence, the proof that someone lived, loved, and left behind echoes for the earth to swallow. Nature takes back what is hers, and I am there to witness it. To me, beauty lives in the ruin, in the peeling wallpaper, the half-collapsed porch, the last photograph left in a drawer. Each image is a story of reclamation, of how memory and matter intertwine long after the living have gone.
In Talbot County, and later in Columbus, time does not pass. It settles, heavy and slow, like dust on forgotten furniture. And that is where my work begins.
