← Return to From Afar: 2020 Senior Art Exhibition
To produce a photograph, I use performance and arranged settings to represent and document people or my own state of mind. In my exploration of documentary photography, I combine both nonfiction storytelling and reenacted studio performance to create surrealist images. Each action is improvised throughout the process of arranging and producing these stories. They are performances without witnesses; the only evidence that something occurred is the final image.
In Were There Any Witnesses, created during self-isolation, I became attached to certain spaces that I connected with as my own self-awareness disintegrated. Instead of working with other people or familiar objects, I found myself continuously crawling underneath my house. It started with a simple curiosity to explore this cold, static space directly under where I sleep; I began peeking in, admiring the jars filled with unidentified substances sitting in rows lining the 3-foot-tall walls. Then I found myself inside, crawling deeper, pausing after every shuffle, checking to see if I was alone. Once I made it fully past the threshold, the jars became my new relics. They were mine now, as I rearranged them over and over again. I knew this was my room now, as I started using it as a shrine. For the birds that had been killed in my window, for a lost unvisited family member, for the previous owner, and for things I will never admit to. All in my room under my house.