PROJECT STATEMENT

I learned to make photographs in the traditional way with film, chemistry, and light sensitive papers. Making a photograph was a series of manual processes and one would hold or hang a photographic print to look at the final image. But as many photographers in the late aughts, I shifted towards digital photography and found myself working at computer. Not only did the digital medium affect the process and experience of making a photograph, but the final object as well. Instead of a photographic print, images became most often digital renderings projected on screens - a new landscape for photographs where the physical reality was reinterpreted and layered with a digital one.

I often return to this idea of the tangible and the invisible layered to form another understanding of reality, one where people experience more of their existence and where geo-political conflicts are playing out more frequently (e.g. cyber attacks on infrastructure services).

In this body of work, I am looking at the superimposition of a digital reality blended with a physical one. These objects were fabricated to serve as a visual equivalents for the data in a digital photographic file blended with an analogue original. They were made to consider and encourage a conversation about the perception of reality, and how it is increasingly a blending of the physical and digitally conceived projections.

The final mixed media objects are the outcome of an experimental process informed by the layered works of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken. They are unique digital chromogenic prints onto which I silkscreen printed, in acrylic ink and gloss, the contents of the image’s digital file (its hexadecimal values). These hexadecimal numbers are the data contents of each image as a jpeg file. The photographs are from my inventory of diaristic images. Each one was chosen for its natural setting and/or elements to create a contrast with the digital and mathematical nature of the text.