artist statement
Growing up my mom would tell me stories about my grandfather getting a job at a newspaper company where he retouched photos & prepared them for printing. Hearing these tales as a kid over the years sparked my interest to enroll in a photo class my junior year of high school where I made a pinhole camera. Around that same time, I began to extensively look at a lot of fashion magazines & loved the meticulous artifice and concepts of editorial spreads in Vogue , Harper’s Bazaar & the art direction for photos in America’s Next Top Model , among tons of artifacts in pop culture.
The experience and wonder of being in the darkroom combined with these odd and glossy images led me to pick up a camera and constantly shoot.System Restoration is personal narrative about my experience with epilepsy and seizures. One thing that deeply affected me after having multiple seizures were issues with memory and consciousness, as well as the loss and subsequent rebuilding of my identity. After having multiple seizures, I was out of commission and felt like a defective human being and had to slowly rebuild myself, piecing together who I was again.
System Restoration is a video incorporating my thoughts and work I have done using popular media as a tool of translation to communicate something I am unable to express. I want to re-create the struggle & the state of disarray when of recovering from the effects of epilepsy & seizures in this video, allowing the viewer to experience that process of building one’s being back up just as a system of networks would.
The experience and wonder of being in the darkroom combined with these odd and glossy images led me to pick up a camera and constantly shoot.
