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Balboa 1
Photography & Digital Art
Balboa 2
Photography & Digital Art
Balboa 3
Photography & Digital Art
Ether
Photography & Digital Art
Exulansis
Photography & Digital Art
Falesia
Photography & Digital Art
Foilsick
Photography & Digital Art
Frostbitten
Photography & Digital Art
Mezzanine
Photography & Digital Art
Odd Places
“Odd Places” is a meditation on liminal spaces: those unsettling in-between places the internet has become obsessed with in recent years.
Empty malls. Abandoned gas stations. Highways that stretch into nothing. Inspired by the ‘Backrooms’ urban myth and the modern fixation on spaces that feel familiar yet deeply wrong, this series follows a single wandering figure through forgotten corners of Oklahoma and abroad, asking: what does it feel like to be stuck between leaving and arriving?
Each piece begins with a photograph of a real location. Buildings left to rot, fields frozen in time. Then a small, cartoonish character is added in post, wandering alone, pausing mid-journey to wonder if they’ve been here before or if they’re lost. The work carries a matured ‘Oh, The Places You’ll Go’ vibe, echoing the quiet melancholy of The Waiting Place where you’re meant to keep moving but can’t quite figure out which direction to go or where you’ll fit in. There’s also a touch of Edward Gorey in the snapshot-like compositions: moments frozen in time, darkly whimsical yet humanly sad. And the isolated stillness of Edward Hopper’s surreal works, where loneliness lives in geometry and light.
Many of the titles come from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Onism (the frustration of being stuck in just one body, in just one place). Exulansis (giving up trying to explain an experience because no one can relate to it). Olēka (The Awareness of How Few Days Are Memorable). An extra layer that treats these spaces like a state of mind, points of reflection amidst a journey that has no foreseeable end.
This is the drawn-out moment. The brisk walk through an eternal bliss. The places you go when you’re not sure where you’re going at all.
Early Oddities
“A brisk walk in an eternal bliss.”
It started with a photography assignment: shoot a familiar place in an unfamiliar way. My parents’ neighborhood was under construction, with half-built homes, dirt roads, and scaffolding casting long shadows across empty lots. I became obsessed with places that felt still, devoid of life to the point where they almost seemed dream-like, and I wanted to depict that feeling.
Stark, high-contrast images of isolation and geometry. Jarring angles. Clever cropping. Spaces built for people who weren’t there yet, or had already left. No color. Just emptiness, shadows, and the strange beauty of suburban Oklahoma caught between what it was and what it would become.
These photographs taught me to see abandonment not as decay, but as atmosphere. They planted the seed for what would eventually become Odd Places. The wanderer didn’t exist yet, but the world they’d walk through was already here: a dead world where humanity’s creations are left unchecked, waiting for someone to notice them again.
The First Places
After a semester of black-and-white photography exploring emptiness and stillness, the final assignment asked for something more. That’s when Odd Places got its name.
The First Places was where the concept clicked: color photographs of forgotten Oklahoma landscapes paired with a single wandering figure, creating a vocabulary for being stuck between destinations. These works sought to demonstrate the choice: do you stay, or do you go?
The centerpiece was Exulansis, shot on the Oklahoma salt flats. A lone post in the middle of nowhere. The character sits beside what looks like a body (or is it resting? preserved? dead?). It’s a deeply personal image: that figure on the ground is me. Despite how bleak it looks, this post and this “corpse” are the only tether to reality. Would you leave it to brave the endless horizon? Or stay with the one familiar thing, even if it’s lifeless?
Exulansis became the quintessential Waiting Place. The moment where you realize you’re stuck, but you’re not sure if moving forward is brave or just foolish. It was so foundational that I brought it into my graduation exhibition a year later, refining the character’s stance but keeping the scene intact.
This is where Odd Places was born. Not as a series, but as a single, all-encompassing image that asked: what comes next?
The Final Seven
The initial 7 pieces represent the culmination of two years of exploration. I took my experimental black-and-white photography studies and refined them into a cohesive artistic statement. These seven pieces became my thesis: Onism, Suburbia, Frostbitten, Mezzanine, Ether, Olēka, and Exulansis. Each one a frozen moment in the character’s endless journey.
Many of the titles come from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, words for emotions we feel but can’t name. Onism: the frustration of being stuck in just one body, in just one place. Exulansis: the tendency to give up explaining an experience because no one can relate to it, letting it drift away until it feels mythical.
These seven pieces were where Odd Places became real. Not just photographs with a cartoon character, but a visual language for the drawn-out moment between leaving and arriving. The matured Seussian tone, the Gorey-esque snapshots, the Hopper-like isolation. All of it, fully on display.