Utilizing a tableau of pop culture, my artwork is a stage that allows me to decipher individuality and the influence of the collective experience. More specifically, the work explores the disjunction between expectations and reality for women in early adulthood.
As Umberto Eco describes in Travels in Hyperreality, “visuals (cinema, videotape, mural, comic strip photograph) are apart of our memory” and the “experience (love, fear, or hope) is already filtered through ‘already seen’ images.” It would be hard for me not to acknowledge this within my own memories and personal expectations; everything I have experienced has been reinforced by the Western version. The extended reality of media, legends and social standards become instruments that create the symphony of discovering self, which makes it hard to distinguish what is authentic and what is simulated.
My process it to use myself, my own encounters and the ideas I have of human understanding to define the thin line where the collective cultural expectations are impossible to separate from the self. I approach my medium, photography and video, in a fashion that recognizes the staged presence. Self-portraiture allows me to show the awareness of the camera and how in turn it constructs a relationship of creating identity.
My Future is Near is a new photo project that makes use of a technical process where what is imagined and desired can visually become defined. Using photographs, and magazines within a virtual space; I create a private urban haven where I reside peacefully among designer furniture and adorned by my beastly friends.
At first glance the work is falsely sweet, once the images are fully examined it is realized that my character is incapable of living in reality, but is also sadly alone. Although the work is currently in progress, it is my goal to demonstrate the conditions of modern society and the distorted perceptions that make it hard to distinguish the real from the unreal.
