Recontextualize and Hyperreality

I am human. I am shaped by the world around me. Everything I do is a reaction to and was created by this world. What I eat, what I look like, what I wear, what I see, what I experience, what I am affected by, and so on; are all determined by this world. My art reflects my place in this world.

Working mainly photographically, I use self portraiture to show how current events, society and time affect me personally. I began with an interest in scars on skin, time, and the healing process of others, which I have not completely abandoned. At this point, however, my images include excerpts of text from newspaper articles as well as my nude body. I am interested in how these words and events affect the world and how they affect us, as humans. I work mainly with events stemming from the War in Iraq ; however I do not limit myself to this topic.

Many of these topics, as they are often out of my hands, are to a certain extent forced on me. While I have an opinion on these matters, this is not a protest, nor do I necessarily choose a side through my artwork. I am just highlighting the idea that where I am in life, as an American, as a human being, as a young woman, as an artist; this is what I carry on my back, this is what I carry on my skin, this is what I carry on my body and mind, this is who I am.

World as an Interface

Taking a step away from my current work, I decided to just focus on the body rather than to combine world issues and the body. I chose feet as my imagery for this project. This choice came partly out of personal experiences and the shear volume of photographs of feet on the internet. I tend to take pictures of my feet in different settings, places, and times. With this in mind, I began to search in simplest terms “feet” on the internet. I found it really interesting that so many people take pictures of their feet, and even more interesting that these pictures had the power to show so much about these people. My piece becomes sort of overwhelming for the viewer in that the viewer becomes a part of it. The viewer is forced to see these images in all separate windows and forced to resize the windows in order to see the image in its entirety. These feet pose the question of narrative, although there isn't one, there could be. Even I tend to create a story in my head when I view the piece.The feet bring about questions of travel, place and time.

Final Project- Myspace

My two separate conceptual ideas combined themselves in this piece. In thinking about the idea of how these events affect me personally I wanted to explore the effect they have on a larger world view. I took images from the ever popular “Myspace” and on these images I pasted articles from timesunion.com. I kept the names of the myspace users, they became the window names. The piece becomes a comparison between these two internet sites. What is more important to the average person? What do we see more? What do we want to see more? Also questions arise about the images themselves, how do we want the world to see us? How does the world see us as Americans in light of the war in Iraq ? I do not have the answers to these questions.