A voluntary submission to deception, 2019-
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Many cultures regard mirrors as doorways or portals to another world or plane of existence. However, mirrors are objects full of illusions. Their reflections are shallow and hallow. They cannot contain the objects they seem inhabited by. Yet they offer an ability that no human has: which is to see yourself. Once I have seen myself, I become culpable and accountable for what I am showing. It is a self-knowledge that can’t be taken away.
The initial concepts for this work are built in response to text or language. Often, the ideas comes in the form of an heuristic, a short-hand phrase or concept that is supposed to make communication easier or simpler. But I find these heuristics complicate and undermine communication by obscuring the individual meanings they take on in peoples’ lives. I try to tease out the details and nuance overlooked or bundled up within the shorthand, and frame the experience of an abstract concept or action in a way that witnesses to the varied personal meanings this “common” language is meant to explain.
I choose mirrors as a vehicle to explore the stories, and sometimes lies, we tell about ourselves, or to ourselves, that have come to define our identities. The magic of storytelling, of fiction, has been described as the reader/believer's "voluntary submission to deception".
I heavily work and adorn their surfaces to relate the human hand’s role in constructing this version of reality.
The initial concepts for this work are built in response to text or language. Often, the ideas comes in the form of an heuristic, a short-hand phrase or concept that is supposed to make communication easier or simpler. But I find these heuristics complicate and undermine communication by obscuring the individual meanings they take on in peoples’ lives. I try to tease out the details and nuance overlooked or bundled up within the shorthand, and frame the experience of an abstract concept or action in a way that witnesses to the varied personal meanings this “common” language is meant to explain.
I choose mirrors as a vehicle to explore the stories, and sometimes lies, we tell about ourselves, or to ourselves, that have come to define our identities. The magic of storytelling, of fiction, has been described as the reader/believer's "voluntary submission to deception".
I heavily work and adorn their surfaces to relate the human hand’s role in constructing this version of reality.