“Dear Erin Hart,” is a brand new body of work that came from my identity being stolen by Erin Hart, a woman who recently committed a number of petty crimes in the San Francisco Bay Area using my New Mexico state driver’s license at the times of her multiple citations and arrests. My wallet was stolen from SF Camerawork in October 2009, which is how Erin Hart procured my ID. The theft of my identity led to an unfortunate chain of events that has now hopefully ended with my ID being confiscated from her, her real identity being revealed to me, then my very recent appearance in court to clear up the charges against me.
I tallied up what the financial cost has been to me to clear my name, wrote Ms. Hart a letter with the invoice, and plan to send it to her. I retraced her crime spree, documenting relevant places and interviewing witnesses in an effort to understand what happened while building a portrait of her. This project examines of my personal experience with identity theft, which inevitably overlaps with an investigation of privacy.