I have always been drawn to the places where beauty and strangeness meet.

As a shy, introverted child, I escaped into elaborate fantasy worlds of my own making. Art became another refuge. In third grade, an unusually art-minded teacher filled the classroom with color at the same time that another kind of color, and the racism surrounding it, was beginning to isolate me from my peers.

By high school, I had found kindred spirits in the art room. I once painted a rose black and quietly took note of who thought it was weird and who understood what I meant. My art teacher understood.

Then I discovered photography.

I would have lived in the darkroom if they'd let me. I loved the smells, the alchemy, the quiet darkness and warmth. I loved watching something invisible slowly reveal itself. And I loved being hidden there.

In my twenties, art followed me into less conventional territory. I tried graffiti, badly, but fell in love with the freedom of it and with seeing anonymous acts of creativity appear in public space. After an extended journey through the streets and drug cultures of Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, I eventually emerged on the other side and earned BFAs in painting and printmaking from the University of Washington.

I later moved to San Francisco for graduate school, exhibited in group shows and open studios, and briefly apprenticed at Precita Eyes Mural Arts. Eventually the institutional art world managed to accomplish something drugs, chaos and adolescence hadn't: it gave me artist's block.

So I stepped away from the art world, but never from making art.

Years later, photography found me again, first through an iPhone and then through a camera given to me by my best friend. This time it stuck.

Today my photography keeps returning to people and places that exist somewhat outside the expected frame: outsider communities, altered landscapes, street life, abandoned spaces, accidental beauty and evidence of human lives left behind. I'm interested in the strange, the beautiful, the wounded and the alive, and especially in moments when those things occupy the same frame.

I'm still following the same impulse that made a child invent worlds, a teenager paint a rose black, and a young photographer disappear into a darkroom: I want to see what reveals itself when I look closely.

Xan

P.S. In addition to fine art prints and original works, I also offer custom, commissioned artwork! You can learn more about that process on this page.

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