There are Ghosts in the Garage

2018 – 2024

In 2001, a man was brutally murdered in a vacant rental property he was renovating in Allentown, PA. Two miles from the crime scene, his former home bears traces of his reputation as a craftsperson and handyman:  there are custom shelves in the basement, built-ins upstairs, and a vice mounted to a bench in the garage. I purchased his home in 2018, initially unaware of his story, but charmed by the home’s architecture and the latent traces of his work.

This multidisciplinary project spirals out from the objective facts about the house and the man’s headlining death to marry intertextual narrative approaches that trace local, personal, and domestic hauntings. Central to the structure of the work are questions such as:  What can a house possibly know or understand? Known and unknown bodies haunt our domestic spaces, but do their energies ever leave? How does the mythology of home inform us and dictate our lives? From here, the project cultivates poetic flirtations between the haptic and immaterial worlds.

Adjacent to this artistic production, I use text to unravel questions about my role as a woman and a photographer who finds herself haunted by male specters in the home and in the field. Within this practice, I am at once performing domesticity and staging coy interference with the masculine construction of the photographic medium. True crime this is not, but rather, an emancipatory re-imagining of history, lives lost, and the spaces we occupy.