The Butterfly Effect seeks to visually describe the expanse of the after-effects of a double homicide (my brother and his friend) by making photographic portraits of the relatives and friends of the victims, the convicted killers and their families; also the tens of dozens of people who, because of their jobs, became intimately or peripherally involved with this one incident of violent crime.

The Butterfly Effect (named for the philosophic cliché that supposes a seemingly insignificant event can expand to a widely-felt magnitude) will represent the emotional, monetary, and physical impact of a violent crime in 1998, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in which my brother and his friend were attacked and murdered. Over the three years it took for his killers’ trial to wend it’s way through the court system, I saw more and more people become associated with that single event and realized the broad scope of people it affected. Rippling out from friends and families of the victims and the killers, the number of people who came to be involved in some way (police, juries, ambulance drivers, emergency-room doctors and nurses, morticians, reporters, counselors, prison guards, etc.) now numbers nearly 2,000. Their portraits, displayed reticulately, will stand in for grief, guilt, depression, forgiveness, loss of life, emotional recovery, pain and suffering, emanating hotter and stronger from the center of the installation, continuing infinitely outward. Viewers of The Butterfly Effect exhibition will become a part of the project by seeing the faces of the people who precede them, and have the opportunity to add their own pictures to the collection. This is not a memorial, but an artistic visualization of how a 90 second violent act, among ten people, has affected and involved almost 2,000 people in its wake.

Because of my brother’s and his murderers’ young age, high schoolers are a significant audience for The Butterfly Effect. Prison inmates are an audience that are often overlooked, but are very important members of The Butterfly Effect’s audience. I envision showing the work as a maze of expanding relationships, and would like to have a traveling exhibit in high school gyms and prisons. Each of these are unique venues and together provide a balance to The Butterfly Effect in its temperament and inclusion of all those who are effected by a violent act. I look for a way to represent all (or as many as possible) and give them the chance to speak, as well as a way to bring different sides of the story together in exhibition form. High school gyms and prisons both signify and symbolize many things in American culture; this is an opportunity to use each as a place to view a kind of art that inspires reflection and, perhaps, healing.