The Thing About Remembering grew out of time spent on Kandahar Airfield between 2008 and 2010, where I became interested in the ordinary systems that sustain war. Rather than follow combat directly, the work remains on the base, moving through offices, medical rooms, service spaces, and places meant for rest. Kandahar appears less as a battlefield than as a self-contained environment, shaped by routine and by the structures required to keep military life in motion.

The series brings together portraits, scenes from daily life on the base, and isolated photographs of objects found there. A Tim Hortons camouflage cap, a knockoff Hard Rock Cafe Afghanistan mug, slogan patches, war rugs, and other remnants are given the same close attention as the people around them. What interested me was their strange familiarity and the way they folded war into consumer culture, habit, and the visual language of ordinary life. Kandahar Airfield could feel less like the front line than like a town built to make military life appear manageable, even mundane.

What holds the work together is a sense of calm that never settles into ease. The photographs linger on small details and subdued gestures through which war becomes normalized and easier to overlook. In that atmosphere, even the unusual is absorbed into routine. The project looks at war not as a single event, but as a condition absorbed into the routines and surfaces of daily life.

Featured in Canadian Art and shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize