Date of Submission

Spring 2012

Academic Program

Photography

Project Advisor 1

Barbara Ess

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Freak Train

What you are experiencing right now, whether you like it or not, is an evolution of a project I executed last year. The project, KEEPS, consisted of scanned objects which people had kept over the years because they held some secret significance to their prospective owners. Separating an object from its possessor and original context invites the viewer's interpretation of the scanned objects that is based on aesthetic taste in order to then attempt to create a backstory for the object and conceive of its possible importance. The decontextualization involved in KEEPS shaped the photographs I have been taking this year. This project, similar to the scans, detaches objects, people, and certain focused sights from their original setting; these images confuse the viewer's understanding of what they are seeing. Freak Train is an attempt to express my own way of making an emotional connection to aspects of my surroundings based on nothing other than my imagination. These photographs are evocations of the hallucinations I experience when looking at virtually everything, designing an alternative animated existence of banal everyday encounters. The abstraction rooted in Freak Train is used to parallel the state of mind that is engendered by thoughtful reverie, meditating on a fragment of one's physical surroundings. These images are meant to convey the emotional power of daydreams in which our visual realm seems to morph and transform itself into something completely different, when everything that makes up this world is reconstructed to correspond to our own personal visions and perspectives of what is in front of us. Freak Train dissociates the occupants of everyday life to make them somewhat disconcerting or unrecognizable so that the viewer may invigorate these objects and people with his or her own interpretation of their original context and their potential to become something unexpected.

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