Sign Language

My work examines the fragility of identity, and the role that photography plays in our ability to remember and create a self-image. I choose photography and video as a means of understanding and reckoning with a world flooded with images. Embedded in the photographs is a level of anxiety around being seen, or a fear of disappearing that has been enhanced by technological accessibility, consumer culture and the constant absorption of images. Sign Language is a series of photographs that collapse everyday life into a form of abstraction. Each image is a domestic scene that is then deconstructed through color and pattern into varying levels of chaos and order, obscuring the identities of the figures within them. For each piece I seek to form a dialogue with modernist painting – to flatten space, camouflage elements, and transform daily routines and moments into abstract shapes. Using staged environments, studio lighting, and saturated color, I reference familiar visual cues of advertising that are embedded in our collective unconscious. All of the images involve simulated spaces, often domestic ones, alluding to Jung’s idea that one’s house is a representation of their psyche. In this context, my constructed spaces form a contemporary dialogue around identity within a consumer society. I use myself as a model to experience each of the environments I built as well as the claustrophobia of aligning perfectly within them. The performative aspect of the work also nods to the constructed nature of images in commercial media.