ABOUT THE WORK

Photography is a truth-taker & truth-maker. I too am multifaceted like my medium, functioning as observer & creator, both taking & making photographs. I’m a 21-year-old girl with a warped sense of womanhood & a hypercritical frame of mind, both inherited from my narcissistic, manipulative, hypocritical mother. But she hasn’t been present in my life since I was twelve, and my own slew of experiences have re-mangled my perception further. From this perspective, I collect evidence of my observations of the surreal and absurd, while creating performative moments that work to analyze this evidence and express my personal responses. My photographs either invite the viewer into an alternate world or stare back at them to reflect their own gaze – two contradicting messages that develop a more dynamic conversation. For me to fully comprehend something it must be based in reality – I need something tangible to root myself in, something language cannot always provide. A photograph, though, is inherently rooted in reality – a photograph cannot exist without a subject of sorts to reflect light back into the camera to make the exposure. Photographs carve out a space for me to spiral into the conceptual & surreal. In this way, photography has always acted as an extension of thought, the perfect vehicle for me to chase my curiosities. Creating a photograph opens up a higher level of thinking for me. Each new body of work spirals out of the frequent avenues of wonder my mind can’t help but wander down.

Current curiosities:

I wonder about repetition because we exist in regurgitated ideas, rolling around in them, ‘discovering’ what we’ve already discovered. Through renditions, covers, parodies, remixes, knockoffs, & spoofs, we consume what our parents consumed & their parents & their parents & their parents; we are uniquely unoriginal. We’re sponges soaking up what we scrub up against, and harboring whatever doesn’t get rinsed out to grow our own bacteria. If nothing is truly original, what does it mean to create?

I wonder about alternates – other perspectives, altered realities, different decisions, infinite possibilities – because nothing is black & white, everything exists in this complex grey area of multiplicities. But this doesn’t seem conceivable within a binary thought process, a way of thinking that is all too common in modern times. There are endless angles of perspective to consider, all existing to one thing – one body or item or place. Each soul, object, and space can be many alternate entities, things, and expanses. What does it mean to consider all the possibilities?

I wonder about myself. Recently, I began making Mommy Issues: Vol. 1 – which requires a deep observation of self & residual, yet potent, emotions surrounding my childhood. While observing myself, what I saw was a walking contradiction, a brutal realization: I don’t know myself. I want to relocate my sense of self – how could I lose it? What do I look like in front of my own lens?