Kickstarter

I plan on using funding for buying supplies to print my photographs and to construct my 'shrines.' I will be printing 10 24"x36" images and constructing 4 shadow box shrines utilizing paint, clay, wood, metal and miscellaneous other materials (perhaps even carving some figures out of soap!). I will also be using funding to host a one-night show!

Artist's Statement:

How we see defines what we see: our vision is organized by the conditions of our existence, by history and by context. For myself, my journeys in and through photography are in some ways liberated by this knowledge, in the sense that if I bring an awareness of this conditioning and relationality to my work I can aim to disrupt the ways the camera can extend privilege, power and objectification. This was most poignant in traveling, where my positionality in the world as a white American student allowed me access to a mobility that many others will never be able to experience, and provided ethical unease that could never be erased. Moving through that unease is exceedingly important to me, so that I might better understand it and weave that understanding into the ways I walk in the world.

My thesis is an exploration of the mediation images play between intention and being, between art and information, between artifice and authenticity. This exploration will happen on many levels.

I will curate my own series of images that intentionally disrupt the ease with which we consume and digest images. The series of images that explore Bangalore will be amalgamations of photos from Bangalore and Seattle that speak to particular ‘dissonance’ I experience(d) in each place as a result of intense processes of Othering and differentiation (i.e., a hybrid image of lakes in both cities that complicates ideas of water use or the photo on this home page of the Pike Place Market in Seattle and park-goers in Lalbagh in Bangalore). These images will be mediated by ‘second space’—a gallery much like the one the viewer will be standing in but photographically depicted and containing the hybrid as an image on the wall. The viewer will have to move through this photographic space in order to arrive at the photograph on the wall, and this dialectic movement is intended to foreground the distance that exists between the viewer and the subjects of the photograph. This space is also intended to serve as a space for myself as an artist to be present and ‘readable’—as the hand that pushes the viewer further away by creating an intervening space. This second space will also contain a second obstruction, an installation in front of the photograph on the wall that will suggest to the viewer what it is I want them to focus on before arriving at the final image (i.e., a water jug, suggesting that I want the viewer to contemplate water use in the abovementioned tableau).

My second installation of images will revolve around the fragility and sacredness of the photographs I took in Sierra Leone. I will be building 'shrines' to these images in order to both preserve their iconic status in my own memory and to also bring the viewer into an experience of uncomfortable intimacy. These shrines will be a combination of mixed media elements and found/salvaged/reappropriated objects, displayed within shadow boxes carved out of cedar wood.