Pinwheel Quilt, Archival inkjet print of digital photo collage, 47"x43", 2015
Artist Statement
Designs for Walls, Screens, Curtains and Other Security Blankets (working title)
Do security camera and other safety imaging devices make us feel more secure? Or their detailed and time-stamped freeze frame images faithful witnesses to the aftermath of violent events? This series of digital collages are inspired by images of violence captured on security cameras. As the cameras attempt to reveal the hidden identity of the perpetrators, their ubiquity also mask the fear that we all have come to accept in our daily lives.
The series addresses the omnipresence of security surveillance cameras and how they desensitize our concerns for civil liberty. The domestic images of curtain fabric, quilts, wallpaper and rugs, things that we live with and often take for granted, become metaphors for how we are living with the constant presence of surveillance.
Flooding on the Mississippi, Hannibal, Missouri, 2019, Gelatin Silver Print, 15”x15”
Americana
Using medium-format film and silver gelatin prints, the "Americana" portfolio examine issues such as the legacy of slavery, colonization of Native America and the subtle as well as dramatic manifestations of climate change in the US.
Viewers are invited to re-contextualize the photographs of memorials such as Indian burial mounds and statues of Ponce de Leon as evidence of crime against humanity, thus recentering the histories of racism, colonialism and slavery within our collective past. The complex problems of land use and ownership are examined through the economic and political impacts of climate change. For example, the fact that wind turbines and bio-fuel production co-exist in a "red" state show us that the climate change debate is much more than a partisan political issue.
Processional, 4k UHD single channel video projection. Based on a photograph by Macus Yam
Photos w/o Words
Photos w/o Words is a project that explores the use of color half-tone dots in producing off-set printed photographs. The dots are the fundamental mechanism by which colors and images are produced and read. Our understanding of the meaning behind these images are based on a confluence between what we see-the visual mixing of colors and what we know-our personal semiotics of images. Found photographs from printed newspapers are scanned into digital images and made into short videos using the "dynamic zooming" technique commonly referred to as the Ken Burns Effect. This technique directs the viewers to see the different parts of the photograph in a designed sequence. The zooming effect simulates the act of flying. The half-tone dot patterns, when shown on a video screen, also produce the sense of vibration because of the so-call Moiré patterns. These effects are designed to activate the viewers and lengthen the reading of the images.