
Untitled, 1995/2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2017, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2017, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2017, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2017, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 1995/2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 1995/2016, Archival pigment print

Untitled, 2017, Archival pigment print
In 1995, my then best friend Marshall “Mars” Bredt and I drove cross-country,
covering over 11,000 miles six weeks. A year later, he was dead from a heroin
overdose. That trip, and the loss, shaped my adult life, and now, over twenty years
later, in the midst of an opioid epidemic, impacting countless lives, I return to
questions of what was, what could have been. When my wife and I had our daughter,
Henrietta Mars Mergen, I sought to honor my lost friend.
With this work I am returning to places we visited over twenty years ago,
presenting archival photographs with contemporary landscapes, and placing
snapshots on the site where they were taken, emphasizing photography’s
physicality and the dual nature of snapshots: physical containers of memory and
windows to other places.
Psychologists explain shared memories as transactive memory – experiences and
knowledge shared between two people. How does one serve as the sole caretaker of
shared memories? The work considers what remains of a road trip, of a friendship,
of memory, and loss – searching for my friend, myself, and my place in landscapes at
once familiar and new.