<aside> 🌑
FASCIA · EDITION 001 · September 15, 2026
Connective material around the Philadelphia section of A Million Scattered Pieces. This is not a definitive pandemic account. Some of this history is still being processed, researched, and understood.
</aside>
I haven't been back to Philadelphia in four years, since moving to Rochester. Thinking about it from here, it's difficult for me to separate the city from the pandemic, or the pandemic from the beginning of Lemon Juice.
Before Lemon Juice, I had spent years doing museum photography while also working inside the fragile economy of adjunct teaching, at one point teaching at three schools at once. At the same time, I was showing photographs and other work at Vox Populi and publishing books. Roughly 2015 to 2018 was an especially active period for that part of my practice. The pandemic made failures I had already encountered harder to ignore: the distance between what institutions said they valued and how they actually treated people and labor. By then, I felt culturally overeducated for the society I was living in.
The pandemic also changed how I remember Philadelphia itself. There was a reckless amount of construction and what felt like a growing disregard for the space around us. Our mailbox was stolen twice. My car was stolen and gone for about a month. When it came back, the mileage display had somehow been switched to kilometers. There were needles, pen caps, and a pair of shoes left inside. I still wonder what happened to it during that month. I remember altered streets and altered skies, police helicopters, demonstrations, isolation, health concerns, and the feeling that systems I had assumed were stable were suddenly much less convincing.
I am not done with that period. There is a larger archive to excavate and much more processing to do. That incompleteness is part of the record.
My relationship to Amrita Yoga & Wellness began before Lemon Juice.
My second marriage was coming apart. I found a room on Craigslist with a woodworker named Michelle, in a former coffin factory in Fishtown, and within a week I had moved in. I was trying to transform my situation while remaining healthy enough to take care of myself and a girl I was helping raise.
That was when I joined Amrita.
Yoga became one of the ways I learned to work with that instability. The discipline of the practice gave me somewhere to put my attention. It helped me train focus, stay with discomfort, and begin changing how I moved through the world.
I had my spot on the left side of the room, away from the windows. I knew that piece of floor intimately. Returning to the same place, practice after practice, became part of learning how to stay with myself.
Amrita became part of that transformation.
So when Heather Rice later let Natalee and me get married there in 2019, and then trusted me with a key during the pandemic, the studio was already much more than available square footage. I had a personal history with the place.
During the pandemic, Heather gave me access to the studio freely, without creative conditions. I could open the windows, work masked, use the room when I needed it, and begin testing photographic situations that required distance, time, air, and trust. That same concern with safety also pushed the work outside—to open-air locations and rooftops.
Heather later joined some Lemon Juice conversations to talk through business questions, but that came after the relationship to the place itself had already been established.
practice → trust → space → experimentation → collaboration
Amrita wasn't simply a venue for Lemon Juice. It was one of the places that had already changed me before Lemon Juice existed.
Lemon Juice wasn't initially imagined as my individual studio under another name.