Photography
The Sky is Falling
The earth beneath our feet and the sky above ours heads place us within the embrace of nature’s space and tethers everyone in their environment without necessarily localizing the place. Utilizing the narrative of “the sky is falling” I hope to bring the immediacy of nature’s threat to the global audience. I have used digital photography to take images of sky and intervene with a human and technical hand to subvert the nature depicted in the image.
I used databending, changing the code of the image with text editing, to insert quotations from scientists, psychologists, and articles about climate change into the photographs of sky, creating man-made coded artifacts and glitches in the images. Coding allowed me to make changes within images without immediately seeing how those changes impacted the image, much like how our actions can create imperceptible changes in the environment that go unnoticed until they accumulate. In some images I imposed parts of the coded text with the hidden, yet explicit, placing of those quotes. I further distorted the images through photoshop, inserting more human interference and alterations. The resulting images are surreal, recognizable but strange, a sky that is falling and unnatural because of our negligence and direct actions.
Consume
2022
Consumerism consumes the consumer. I have noticed the amount of time and attention that my endless scrolling, viewing, and online shopping eats away from my life and sense of being. It is cyclical in nature. In my work I utilized long exposure digital photography to create a blurred, slick effect that simulates the intake of endless visual consumer stimuli, such as: advertisements, television programs, packaging presentation in stores, and endless scrolling on phones. Referencing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the form is a similar whirlpool shape which is associated with entropy. My three dimensional spiral creates a visual landscape that both draws the viewer in, consuming them, and relates the breakdown of attention and sense of self and place that this consumption facilitates. The size of the piece also is meant to enhance the feeling of the viewer being sucked into the endless cycle of consumerism in a large blur of colors, much like color field paintings.
Memories are what make up a person, and within the present moments of our lives we encounter experiences which become embodied in us. Idealized notions of femininity which are reinforced by society and family are part of the experiences collected in childhood which become part of our embodiment. Scrapbooks, a typically feminine craft, are often representations of prized memories in which the subject is seen to correctly embody those ideals. Within my own experiences of childhood, I was taught the ideals of womanhood and femininity from my mother and family and often these moments in which I fulfilled their expectations, meeting their ideals, was photographed and put into a scrapbook. These moments, slips of memory meshed together, are now juxtaposed with my current subjective views of what womanhood looks like to me and are part of my own embodiment as a person. Using traditional scrapbooking methods, I cut up original family photographs of family, especially of my mother and myself, and new ones of myself in reflected concepts of the originals. The use of thin cutting board instead of paper backing in the scrapbook sleeves resonates with the idea of separation between the ideal and reality while also reinforcing an aspect of woman hood, that of working in the kitchen, and allowing for the photographs on the pages to makes morphing forms as the pages are turned.
Hyper Composed Fireworks
2018
