Jury’s choice n°2

Don Quixote battling a windmill is sometimes how I think of my relation to the behemoth that is photography, the authority and fantasy of its single-lens perspective having wrought it supremacy over other kinds of knowledge and experience. Frustrated, even angered by its proximity to, and vehicle for our seemingly insatiable want for pictures, and for things–for acquisition and obsolescence– I am also beguiled by its charms. In the face of photography’s relentlessness, I console myself that it is just a medium and that, like words, it provides a vehicle for communication. And so, I make pictures of very ordinary things in a way that destabilizes and questions the camera’s authority while also indulging in its sexiness, soliciting a visual pleasure that is tethered to the other senses.

My still life photographs readdress arenas such as the home to acknowledge what is often disregarded as natural and innate. That “home” is a place and an idea takes work, both literal and ideological. Working in ceramics, textiles, as well as food and text, I propose a reconsidering of these systems as they rub against and alongside one another. The porcelain vessels I make are pushed to a fragility that bespeaks of aspiration and a reckoning with failure, their “repair” with synthetic brightly colored epoxy is a reference to Japanese kintsugi that I hope honors as well as acknowledges diasporic influences, gaps, and fissures. Similarly, projects in textiles are means for me to consider aesthetics and values as they translate across media and circumstances. Alongside all of this, I’ve been working on a writing project that is a academic, essayistic, and diaristic hybrid, thinking through and across these intersecting processes and concepts. Photography, ceramics, and writing, all of which aim to assert delicacy, fragility, and interdependence as means to a sustainable life.

I make photographs to address the mash up of our globalized society in relation to the idiosyncrasies of place and time. There’s the specifics of the “stuff” one knows as home as well as how one arrives here. This literal and figurative space and feeling is some intangible combination of smells, tastes, touch, sound and, unavoidably sight through IG, glossy magazines, television, and other picture media. Resisting photography’s homogenizing and fantasy-driven mode, my pictures aim to be an indelicate, vulnerable yet sometimes glorious proposition.