The "summer box" was a toy chest that my father had built for my sister and I when we were kids. After we outgrew our toys, it became a storage chest for our summer clothing in winter and all objects out of season. It now resides in my parent's garage and functions as a crypt containing the history of our childhood. My father was a pilot in the Air Force, which necessitated almost yearly changes in residence until I was sixteen. The summer box was not small, yet we dragged it everywhere we went and it is one of the very few items my parents own that survived all of the moves.
The images in the Summer Box series are loosely diaristic documents of the strategies I used as a child to attempt to reconcile myself with an environment that would not stand still long enough for me to understand it. In these pieces, I attempted to evoke the constructed interior worlds that functioned as bridges and safety ropes for dealing with constant external change and the loneliness it engendered. Echoing through many of the images in this series is the fragmentary interior dialogue recollected from explorations of personal rites of passage and the mysteries of internal time and transition.