The Pearly Gates Archive is a body of work through which I’ve channeled a decade of existential discombobulation. Its images are digitally assembled, by hand, merging irony, nostalgia, and pieces and parts of scanned twentieth century photographs into the idiosyncratic language of analog vernacular photography.

Gabriel García Márquez once optimistically wrote that “Life is the best thing ever invented.” The Pearly Gates Archive, circling this claim like water around an open drain, is a counterfactual examination of this idea. Instead of facts, its images offer up evidence of absurdities having been committed, one after another, each one intended to focus on the paradox of our primitive instinct to both value “the best thing ever invented”, while at the same time, also, doing everything we possibly can to squander it.

pbl 2024

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