I am interested in themes of perception, mediation, memory, and blurred binaries, especially those between man and nature, and between the sexes. When I say mediation, I mean the lenses through which we observe and interpret our experiences as living beings. Memory, gender, and ideas of man and nature are all examples of such lenses. I find it interesting how every individual's perception is distinct, and there may be no way to ever truly know what it is like to be someone other than oneself. Art is one of the very few ways that we can make a serious attempt at knowing one another. These frames of view and methods of understanding are not only marginally interesting, but vitally important, both socially and politically. When I say that I am interested in themes of man and nature, I am very aware of the fraught history that has come together to synthesize our contemporary ideas of what is "man" and what is "nature". The very fact that we expect "man" to mean "all humans" when it, in many ways does and has not, is just scratching along the surface.
I am interested in the boundaries of these social constructs, where they break down and fall apart. I'm sure that in part my perspective on these things is informed by my nonbinary identity, which is something that I have been cognizant of since childhood. I don't mean to say that I am thinking and working strictly along themes of gender and gender identity, because I really am not. I only mean to say that my gender certainly shapes my perspective, and as someone who doesn't fall into the conventional gender binary, I am afforded a jumping off point that is already critical of discrete categorization.
My interest in these themes, as well as a lifelong personal connection to what we in our society call "Nature" has led me to become extremely interested in the ways in which we, as humans, relate to our environment, from the largest to the smallest scale. We are all participating, in our own ways, to the collective cultural production of nature as we know it, through imagination, memory, storytelling, image-making, art practice, law, GIS, zoning boards, wetland offsets, housing developments, zoos, documentaries, nature preserves, wildlife management areas, cloning projects, invasive species removal projects, hayrides, safaris, taxidermied museum specimens, advocacy groups, encon police, pressed flowers, pollinator gardens, and elementary school composting programs.
Nature is, in the western construction, the things that aren't us. Everything but us. But we know we are animals too.
There is an intense beauty in the imperfections of digital methods of capturing and relaying information, similar to the warping effect of an old windowpane, or the scattering of light through a sheer plastic fabric. It creates an emotional effect very similar to the dissonance felt when focusing too keenly on the fact that it is impossible to see the world from any perspective other than your own inherrently flawed senses, or dwelling too hard on the fact that it is equally impossible to disentangle yourself or the millions of other things in the world from each other. You are simultaneously painfully alone in your experience and completely and entirely enmeshed in the beautiful web of everything that exists.
The photo "of" one thing is inevitably of many, many things, all the way down to the light particles, digital artifacts, compression damage, and not only of the intented subject, but the minutia and degredation of everthing in the frame, perceptable to the human eye or not. This is very related in my mind to the fact that I can never know, no matter how hard I try, what it truly is like to be any other animal than myself, let alone a plant, a bacterium, a grain of sand. I can't even understand what it might be like to be another human who isn't me. But I can in pain or solace remember that everything that I do is influenced by and has influences on every other thing around me.
I know the idea of the butterfly efect is not new or revolutionary, but I am glad that butterflies and I can and have had effects on one another. There is only one finite world, and for better or worse, we all have to share it. You cannot isolate yourself from the space you inhabit and your fellow inhabitants any more than you can photograph a tree without photographing the moss in the cracks of the bark, and the light particle flashing off the back of a miniscule beetle slogging its way through the moss, and the cryptic lines left by caterpillars on the leaves, and the quality of the air. And as the images of these physical phenominon degrade and simplify into pixels and HEX codes and CMKY dots, the inherrent interconnectedness of existing blurs with the equally inherrent disconnection between your sensorial experience and the wider world, in a perfect illustration of the duality of existance.