Archival Inkjet Prints, digital painting • Zine • 2017
This series explores how the relationship between reality and camera use has changed our experience of the actual moment. Working with digital painting allows me to destroy the “reality-like” spatial relations that photography relies on to be seen as a perfect rendering of life. Instead, I recreate the spatial relations based on how I remember the experience through elaboration and exploiting the colors not initially in the foreground. The images take place in a bar in Mishawaka, Indiana, where my friends and I would go to drink when we all had the chance to be together again. I had asked my friends to take photos with disposable cameras instead of their phones so they could not be edited at the moment. I had no intention for these images, they sat undeveloped for four years. It wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina I was compelled to develop the film. I find it interesting to see what they wanted to remember and what they found important. While they were just us goofing around at the time, I see them now as a celebration of a post-industrial community life.