A sculpture created in conjunction with my BFA thesis.
I find myself repeatedly drawn to the strange notion in our culture that nature is not the place we live, but a place we go to visit. As humans we have a compulsion to separate ourselves from the greater natural world, and this has ramifications on our social and mental wellbeing. As we become more immersed in technology and more removed from nature some things are lost and others gained.
I photograph the human figure, sometimes in the landscape and sometimes in the studio, cropping the photos to abstract the body. I then use photoshop to assemble these photos into still composite images or moving GIFs, drawing on top of the body or using images of actual plants I have scanned to create the visual illusion of the plants growing out of the bodies or being a part of the bodies themselves. The GIFs I make into short loops, to show the motion of the subject breathing or the plants growing. When finished, I find these images aesthetically pleasing, but others often describe them as unsettling. This is what I want, to dwell in a place that’s at least mildly uncomfortable, a crux point between the lovely and the unsettling. Because so much of my work directly deals with the human, the figure, the bodily, it’s difficult for a viewer to not approach the work in a way that is fairly loaded. I also use a computer to make all of these images, therefore furthering in my own life the separation from nature which I am trying to rectify through my work. Because my means of approaching this idea is in itself contradictory, it makes sense to me that the resulting images would be uncomfortable and ambiguous. This ambiguity is critical -- I think all of these works have at least one distinctly positive and one distinctly negative way they can be interpreted. Half of my interest is seeing these elements exist in the same space, and watching the reactions of viewers to this, ultimately reflective of how they cope with their own inner dualities and contradictions.