Date of Submission

Spring 2016

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Photography

Project Advisor 1

Barbara Ess

Project Advisor 2

David Bush

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Human consciousness seems uniquely constituted. We add, subtract, divide, link, memorize, imitate, transform, reform, measure, categorize, analyze, predict, deconstruct, and rebuild the world around us as a way of understanding. These structures are ingrained in our everyday life. What does it mean that we know through these illuminating boundaries? And how does knowledge build up on itself on the basis of their entwined systems?

The making of this work consists of a questioning of our constant desire to make sense of things, and the criteria that we build in order to satisfy this desire; in other words, the thought-spheres that we value as the vehicles to finding something true. In both a formal and a metaphorical way, I seek to reveal the imaginary ‘grid’ that we place over the world in order to disrupt it, to break and transform it, to show the magic and artifice of its nature.

In understanding a photograph in its most basic element – as light particles read by a surface – we can see a medium that centers on the convergence of science and art, two of the classic pillars of understanding. Photography’s historical trajectory has been a paradoxical one. As debates over the medium’s objective vs. subjective possibilities develop, science looks to remove the human subject from the work, while art tries to bring the maker to the forefront. As a tool, photography has brought science and art closer together, as theory, it has simultaneously started to pull these counterparts apart.

These photographs happen in the performance of interweaving these conventionally opposed ways of knowing. They trace the exploration of what it feels like to move amongst these two poles in an anarchical manner.

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