The Motel Project

            My work explores the dynamism between repulsion and attraction in an intimate setting. The motel is an anonymous and unobtrusive space that serves its purpose by providing the bare essentials seasoned with a few ‘comforts’. The room becomes yours for a night and your mess is cleaned up and all traces of you are erased from the space after you leave. Taking photographs of motel rooms after the patrons checked out allowed me to document stray artifacts and the overall wear on the room. I was interested in both the short and long-term effects people had on a space designed to be both intimate and universal. The patron knows in the back of their head that this room was inhabited hundreds of times before them, with people sleeping and showering in the same spots as them divided only by time. This inability to escape the contact with others – the smells, the worn spots on the armchair, the cigarette burns in the carpet- this repulsion is often blocked out. And the layers of meaning that emerge through time in a spot can be both disturbing and comforting because of the level of intimacy. The Motel Project documents the emerging patterns of what is ‘left behind’- in the way the human body interacts with and leaves its imprint on objects- by unconsciously manipulating the rectangle into an organic form. The focus is the beautiful abstract shapes that emerge from the colors and textures of these interactions and a general curiosity toward the overlooked objects and what they communicate about us.