My childhood was definitely marked by the sort of 'rough' living I did with my cowboy dad in British Columbia. I also had a 'civilized' side to my life thanks to my mum, with whom I lived during the school semester. She preferred to live in a town, so we had the luxury of toilets, indoor showers and central heating (my parents divorced when I was very young).
There is something very unique and uncanny about the vast wilderness of Canada. People in Europe have trouble comprehending that you could go for a walk in a forest and you might never be seen again, or that you could possibly be killed by a wild animal if you’re unlucky or reckless. I’m not saying that it’s happening to people every day, but the risk is real.
Most of my work tends to take place among 'new world' architecture which harkens back to the vernacular architecture of my youth; it’s a sort of drab 20th-century utilitarianism that is so prevalent in North America. Imagine run down highway motels, corner shops with hand-painted signs, generic and bland institutional buildings, isolated gas stations, ubiquitous fast-food chains and industrial parks, all set against the backdrop of a never-ending and unfathomable wilderness.

All the bars and art galleries.

I was seduced by the immediacy and seriality of the photograph. Its indexical nature – the fact that whatever happened to be depicted in the photograph was something that existed and converged, if only for a moment, in front of the lens (baring CGI and digital manipulations of course) is still magical for me. The seriality was fantastic, in the sense that I could take many images and many different tries of a subject or idea quite quickly in order to test and see what worked best with what I was trying to do. I quickly abandoned my torturous painting exercises that would take days, if not weeks, to finish, in favour of this sparkling and versatile medium.

I do not try to create specific narratives for each image, or even for each project for that matter. The intent is more a mixture between the spontaneous and improvised with the creation of a certain atmosphere or mood. The image comes about quite instinctually once I have set up the shot. I try to leave my work as open to interpretation a possible because trying to pin some sort of specific story or intent onto a piece is quite boring and didactic. Meaning is very fluid and ephemeral and is a constructed human concept, it does not exist inherently within the world. I prefer to employ this sort of nihilism in my work because the world is a bloody mystery; incomprehensible and obscure.

It’s true that I do enjoy playing with a certain nostalgia in my imagery. There are definite references to '50s and '60s culture, but I also allude to other eras such as the '70s, ¡80s, and even the '90s. There is something comforting and engaging about employing codes and structures that people are familiar with. It also gives the images a false sense of security and seduction that can then be undermined by disruptive or mysterious actions and situations within the image.
Cinema is definitely a big influence on my work. I have a great affection for Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Film Noir and old trashy B movies. I am also an avid watcher of contemporary cinema; I love the work of Andrea Arnold, Denis Villeneuve, S. Craig Zahler, Herzog, early Spielberg, Jane Campion… I am pretty open to most genres. I tend to watch about a film a day. Sometimes three or four if I feel like I need a movie day (those days where you stay in bed and order delivery three times and only get up to go pee). I do love to read as well. I like to read Southern Gothic and Westerns.

That’s a bit difficult to choose. One place I would be interested in seeing is Canada during the frontier days. I have read a few journals from early explorers and tradesmen and it seems like a pretty rough and precarious time, it's fascinating!

It was definitely not my plan from the get-go. When I had started my photography degree at university, I was at a loss as to what I wanted to photograph. We were learning about the controversies and problematics of photographing others, people and things outside of our social/racial/economic/gender/cultural milieu and I thought that in order to sidestep the controversies of representation it would be simpler to use myself as a subject. I felt that it was a starting point from which to explore the world. After 20 years I am still photographing myself, albeit not necessarily for the same reasons. Now I feel it is based on a need to explore the imaginary realms within and to use the self as the protagonist in the parallel worlds I create.

I had been reading about how tourism is one of the only 'sub-universes' of the imaginary where fantasy and reality coexist. I found the idea of the extension of the illusory into the physical realm to have ties with my own work. As such, for this project, I felt like I was pushing my work one step further in my exploration of the phantasmic worlds that I had already been engaged with for a long time.
In The Tourist, I created a skimpily-clad, overly suntanned, glossed-up lady-tiger who has gone in search of her ideal self in Miami and Cancún. I have a certain ambivalence about her – she is both repulsive and enticing, endearing and ridiculous, earnest yet manipulative. We tend to use our vacation snaps as a way to idealize the voyage. I conceived of the project as a photo album of a trashy and unlikely vacation. There are attempts at idealization but upon closer inspection you can see the cracks in the veneer.

I just finished developing a feature film script with a screenwriter friend of mine and now we are focused on getting it made! Also, I have completed the layout for a new book called The Other End of the Rainbow that won the special mention in the Luma Rencontres d’Arles Book Dummy Award, so I am working on getting that ready for publication as well.