Inside out consumer: Self-portraits from within
Photography, 2005.

IN THE FIRST FEW MONTHS after returning to Canada from having spent twelve years in Portugal, I came to Montreal with my wife and my first two girls. One of the most difficult things to adapt to was our change in eating habits. I suppose this was due in part to the availability of certain foods and not others and having moved away from Rita's mother, our girl's grandmother, who used to prepare lamb and vegetable dishes for the babies, along with the most incredible soups, using beans and cabbage from their own garden from their country house.

MOVING IN ITSELF is a trauma; the emptiness of missing friends, missing places, the lost comfort of language, smells, landscape, preferred places—our favorite cafe, Piriquita, in Sintra, serving Travesseiros, a puffed pastry stuffed with a hot almond and egg yolk filling, along with a superb espresso or café au lait and then, arriving to the added emptiness of an apartment without furnishings, sitting on boxes, eating from a few culled dishes, waiting for our belongings to arrive from Portugal by shipping container, months late due to customs foul-ups.

ITS WITH THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, I began my classes at Concordia University in Montreal. One class with Scott Toguri-McFarlane was called The Art of Eating. Chapters of Fast-Food Nation were required reading. Reasons for which I left North America were flooding back to me and dealing with reverse culture shock was more than perturbing. Perhaps for the comfort of nostalgia, I chose to write a paper on an interest given to me by my Dutch background, 17th century still life; a sumptuous contemplation of the bourgeois banquet. Ironically, my second paper was on fasting.

THE SUMMER BEFORE MOVING BACK TO CANADA, I had visited New York City while on my way for job interviews in Halifax [another story]. I had once seen a show of Thomas Demands work at the Center Cultural de Belem in Portugal, curated by my friend and professor, Delfim Sardo, who knew how to get students to appreciate the marvel of contemporary art work. But it was only at the MoMA on that NYC trip that I fell completely in love with Demand's photographs of life-sized paper constructions of politically charged interiors, forests and the like. What provoked me to greater interest was seeing the indifference of the few museum goers that went to see Demand's work that day, off in a side room, most others opting for the standard modernist fare of the museum. One beautiful dressed and handsome couple did the run through and literally snorted at the end of it. My, how people are afraid to look, I thought. Do we really have so little time to think about what we see?

STRING TOGETHER the above associations and you might begin to see how I came to my photo based work of inside-out boxes and packaging. I thoroughly enjoy manipulating paper. I see the paper constructions my daughters make and smile with delight, a presentable archive of their own innocence. At first I thought that making the paper constructions was the work. But as I began to document the objects, and play with the lighting and the mood that set, the objects began to convey the mixed sentiments and thoughts of unease that resonated with my own; and my first photo project as an artist emerged.

LIKE 17TH CENTURY DUTCH still life, this work, for me, continues to be about objects of contemplation, turned inside-out. It is self-portraiture as an idea which looks inwardly while at the same time looking at one's social self. Confronting my social and spiritual emptiness was unavoidable. Through a disquieting eeriness, the beauty of solitude, even when most alone and empty, I find there is a connection with the world through what we eat, where we live, what we buy. I hope this work raises awareness of the self, whether alone or adjusting to an irrepresible crowd.