Jackie's Statement

I draw on photography and video to frame allegorical narratives. Employing the use of ambiguous spaces, characters, and time, I focus on the intricacies of psychological trauma in social youth cliques and their establishment of communal hierarchies. In dialogue with idealized notions of adolescence, youth, and womanhood, I seek to explore how these constructions are made through social and cultural practice. I am interested in how societal expectations influence individual behavior.

            Through these visual fictions, I consider the themes of seduction, aggression, madness, envy, and fear as devices for manipulating power within shifting psychological systems in adolescent cliques. In my narratives, the camera manifests the imperceptible marks left behind from these psychological games. Additionally, I am interested in the power the camera holds over its subject. Through the eye of the lens I have the ability to frame the context and exact moment at which these actions are captured, endeavoring to frame them at their most menacing. In my photographic constructions the subjects must partake in the action to solidify a record. They are required to engage in the violent gestures of force to illustrate the hidden trauma. This process of capturing implements a system of dominance between photographer and subject. Much like the reality of these cliques, this power dynamic goes unchallenged.

           Through a deliberate use of aesthetics, I aim to engage the viewer in a game of seduction, just as a youth is seduced by the promise of acceptance. The brutal nature of these mental games is often overlooked due to the implied innocence of its players. My use of aesthetics endeavors to mirror this presumed innocence. 

Chris' Statement

            Support for the æther waned in the early 20^th century, as general relativity emptied it of physical value, leaving a brittle shell of what once was a dense and fundamental property of the universe. Simultaneously, in a booming era for photography, specifically the push to make photography a fine art, æther went through a spatial and dimensional transformation, ending up in the photographic plane. The space photography creates, as of its own accord, between a paper substrate and gelatin emulsion, exhibits properties which are foreign yet recognizable. There is a volume present that seems to have substance. The virtual space of a mirror mimics these properties, but cannot contain them; the mirror plane, being a virtual volume, is fundamentally empty, a reflected image of reality. Its boundaries, its edges, are not challenged, allowing substance to leak out through the transparent frame. A photograph, or certain photographs (a sub-class of the entire genre), occupy a volume that is, of course, an “image,” but an image with different and often substantial density; importantly, it is not a literal reflection. The space created acts differently than both the actual space or a reflected virtual space of what is being represented in the photograph.
            The æther is a unique state of matter, able to act as gas or viscous liquid, exhibiting an inherent dynamism that does not illustrate the origins of its effects. It resembles an ideal gelatin that never solidly or completely sets, moving in currents fast and slow, imbuing the photograph with undetectable movement noticeable only through periphery. Its density is a deceit, just as photography is, but that does not null the effect.
            Glimmers of the æther can be snared through structural phenomena of the image, under the right conditions. Photographic density and boundaries are coupled in a way that leads, ideally, to a destructive end. Peaks in an energy landscape defy the idea of a static system – a ball cannot stay put on a sharp peak. Instability gains momentum at greater heights. Inversely, a ball that rolls in to a steep energy pit will become trapped. The density of an image acts as a scaffold to keep the borders intact. If it is too thin, too light, the edges will crumble and collapse the image. Heaviness acts differently, supplying a strong base for the image to stand. But this, too, can lead to destruction: Stuff too much into a given volume and the boundary stretches. When cracks develop, they offer a path in to the photograph’s volume. There is a dynamism at play here – the ball cannot stay at the peak; fissures close and others open as the current changes. The drive is a search for cracks and fissures in the structure of an image, in the æther that defines the reality of photography.

ayesha saeed-2013

artist’s statement:

I see “possibilities” now in the photographs I take. The work is heavily invested in an epiphany I had at the Art Institute of Chicago with Dutch Modernist Theo Van Doesburg’s painting Counter Composition VIII. It is essentially a white and black painting in a white room; it has an odd tilted framed that seemed to cause me to suddenly see the painting as if it were popping out of the wall like a pixel. This totally flat plane suddenly was like a window into another space with multiple white planes; just like the one I was in. In a moment, I had the experience of being unable to any longer precisely define what was real and what wasn’t.

It was so quiet, and so satisfying. I can only describe it as if I was suddenly liberated from some vast decimal system; a sense was granted that there’s more to what we see around us. We really can move through space, and deconstruct our habitual vision.

Visually, I have tended to be more of a micro- than a macro- person. I often get so immersed in a subject and magnify it so much that it becomes hard for me to look at it from a distance. But after this event something happened; I started producing work from the painting, and as if falling down a rabbit hole, I didn’t know where I was going. Things began to gel when the process took me back to a photograph I had taken in Lahore, Pakistan over a year ago.

I began realizing this experience I’d had with the Van Doesberg was something that had been hinted at in other moments, and that I’d been skirting these same insights or experiences in the past, including in this photo from Lahore. I began using and manipulating this photo to produce most of the works you see in my portfolio, amplifying and exploring the possibilities of this pixelated, mind-body insight.

My work revolves around this word ““possibility”. The writings of Agnes Martin, introduced to me by a professor, really helped me to make sense of my process and what I was seeing; they gave me full permission to just trust these strange-seeming intuitions, and explore them.

I’ve come to understand my work as a process of actually refining my awareness, and my self. I’ve passed through that boundary where I seem to realize it’s not just job/ hobby/work anymore. I guess you could call this process “spiritual”, though that seems limiting. It gives an unknown joy. It makes me value the everyday details of life’s light, and its shadows. The work is about the quietness of the repetitive patterns of our daily lives. It has its unique rhythm which I hear everywhere around me. I see strange systems of chaos and order around me; the beauty of monotony, yet the complexity of it at the same time. The pieces seem to allow me to focus, but then again push me back again so I can see from a distance: the tension of micro and the macro.

The investigation of the image that I am working with lead me to an interesting track which deals with Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mughal architecture, a French doctor and traveller François Bernier along with my own exploration of what square means to me. In nut shell, I Believe in Square and I am finding out my way through it.

David's Statement

Ok im gonna have two cause I'm David and i do what i want.

here is a shorter statement that i wrote 15min ago

statment of the artist. 

I won't pretend to know anything about what is in my images 

but i would really like to. 

In-fact it eats away at me 

because to continue as i have

might lean toward madness

but i won't pretend to know of madness either

I believe It is somewhere between faith and devotion that my actions find reason.

In what im not so sure i know

but i would really like too. 

I do know what it means to try. 

To continue to try. 

In a way ones manhood is falsely assumed by his accomplishments.

Not his efforts. 

I understand effort

Ive heard a man often does but a boy often tries.

Maybe i am disillusioned by the idea of my own success 

I fear its emptiness.

Its finitude 

I seem to prefer to walk away from things empty handed. 

But i have my picture. 

making gestures that allude to my efforts 

I try on many guises looking for the one that may make you smile

I oscilate between wanting you to love me and wanting the picture to love me. 

I’m not sure i know how to accomplish either 

but i would really like to

It is very much a belief in believing though. 

In The frame 

The light 

The camera

what is in front of it

and behind it

The object

the time 

the place

the event

I have my little picture now

this little pathetic record i have made

so trite

so terrible at what it wants to be. 

but boy does it try. In superb detail

Impotent but disarming. 

I flirt with the possiblity of utilizing this power 

because It makes me feel like i am in control of our intimacy.

Here is a draft of my jargony statement that i turn in when i want money from people. which is pretty sad cause its not that good either.

The Politics of Seeing: Artist Statement

I always start by photographing, specifically looking for moments where I can point to the spectacle of my everyday, using the apparatus of the camera to investigate the nature of seeing it. I then seek to politically problematize that way of seeing, through strategies influenced by the history of post-structuralist thought. I arrest that often exclusionary critical faculty to investigate my individual way of seeing as interdependent to a collective, depolarizing the roles of spectator and consumer within the construction of socio-cultural difference. The photographing then becomes a willing flirtation with the possibility of an alternative. It's a fitting allegory for my desire to transgress the burden of what W.E.B Dubois refers to as my 'double consciousness.' It is relief within an inherited repression. 'If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.' - Michel Foucault-. 

When I first took up photography it was the darkroom not the camera that seduced me. Now the distinctions and barriers between the two have collapsed, and I'm interested in the agency of the unique phenomenological space that is created between them. It is a gesture toward depolarizing the space between the question of truth and the subjectivity of desire. After the moment of capture, back In the studio, i start the practice of trying to respond to and complicate what I have done. This allows me to ontologically destabilize the works object-hood and assigned meaning, while taking responsibility for the instinctual elements that construct my narrative gaze. My desires, insecurities, inadequacies, and obsessions, they are all giving form to my pastiched visual language. Through simple shifts in installation, juxtaposition, and context, i provoke moments that point to the malleability of familiar signs and readymade structures, figuring them open and unstable. 

My way of seeing is nestled within the desperation to find my own specificity within a clear cut archetype; Wholly middle class, 2nd generation college educated, raised in predominately white suburban neighborhoods, and most importantly disillusioned with trying to figure out what those things mean to a black body twice removed from the civil rights movement. There is a dissociative blankness there. It feeds a kind of psychological fugue state where the relationship to ones own cultural memory feels familial but foreign, warranted but perverse. My linguistic instinct then slips into an omnidirectional palimpsest, utilizing various forms of intentional and situational code switching. Linguistic systems and their assigned narratives, academic, personal, and pop culture, are deconstructed and re-constructed creating new abstract mythologies from their residue. 

So there exists this ebb and flow; construction and deconstruction, naïveté and criticality, kitsch and camp, the world at large and the studio. I am at war with the irony of my inherited difference, evasively perpetuating and deconstructing its existence. It's a kind of comedy too trite and awkward to be tragic but playing along feeds a seedy kind of omnipresent self-reflection. My work lives in the pleasure of this kind of perpetual abstraction.

Artist Statement (500) Su

Ideally my work will manifest itself only onto a flat rectangle or square, that is, either a painting or a photograph. This constrained form gained its utmost importance from my teenage years, when I was relearning how to see the world through a scientific, mathematical eye. Horizontal and vertical, the ideal two axes x and y meeting at perfect right angle, represents the rational way of looking and thinking. The rectangular or square two-dimensional surface abstracts and compresses the actual, living world, the four-dimensional space-time continuum to its ideological limits, the most rational form.

I see this as an analogy of how we gain knowledge, the world existing as a virtual, digitalized matrix in human mind. But I also remember another kind of knowledge from a time before I must assign cold numbers onto every single thing in my life. I remember one time I was woken up by my grandma at night, got onto a shuttle bus, not knowing where we were going. The darkness outside, the starless sky and scattered window lights from houses on the horizon burnt into my memory, my earliest memory. This other kind of knowledge, the empirical one, reminds me what life really is. I am most human when I experience confrontation between these two kinds of knowledge.

And this confrontation is what I hope to bring into my work. I work with various subject matters, from personal, everyday experience or from scientific discoveries or theories, transforming both into an in-between form of representation. But no matter the source, I want to maintain a kind of opacity in the meaning of the finished picture. This is a two-folded intention. On one hand, I want the picture plane to remain a neutral ground for the viewer to meditate on. On the other hand, I’m attracted to the inherent irony in the attempt to fully communicate knowledge, either scientific or empiric. If the viewer gets from my work something valuable, yet different from what I put into, my task is accomplished.

I’m currently working on two separate bodies of work. The first one is a series of panel paintings. I'm incorporating photo transfer into the painting process, collapsing personal images onto patterns of color theory. This meeting of two different, yet equally important imageries is one example of the absurd confrontation between the two kinds of knowledge. The second body consists a series of photographs. I’m using a photogram of a 3D model of tesseract (a four-dimensional hypercube) as an index to contextualize all the other images, which are mostly representational, mundane photos. By putting an idealized, imaginary image together with the rest, more realistic ones, I’m hoping to question the meaning and the existence in both.

Gerhard Richter once said something like this in an interview. “At some point you have to convince yourself that painting can change the world. Otherwise the act of painting is pure idiocy.” I believe in the value of my work to shift people’s minds. Towards where? I don’t know.

Artist Statement

At the moment, my artistic practice primarily consists of photographs that illustrate disconnections, displacement and distortions that personally relate to me and past experiences of mine.

Recently, I have been focusing on the idea of distorting reality and questioning what reality means. This concept has stemmed from investigating lucid dreams and nightmares from my past; dreams that I have confused with reality for only a moments time-- briefly believing that what occurred while I was unconscious actually happened and is completely factual. In these dreams, many times I am able to see and watch my own self through a lens and predict my own actions. For example, I once had a nightmare where I was viewing myself sleeping from a night vision security camera, while watching an intruder circle my bed, waiting to attack me. After further investigation, it seemed as if my mind was partially awake and in reality, while the other half was hallucinating. While dreaming, I was also capable of thinking of solutions for what I could do to get the intruder out of my house. This raises the question: are lucid dreams a form of reality? Are dreams merely a distortion of reality? Is it possible to have an “out of body” experience while dreaming? What is the difference? 

Bouncing off of this concept, I have become intrigued by the subjective, psychiactric term derealization and the feeling that the external world seems unreal. In my latest project, I have begun creating scenes where reality has been altered or changed, resembling dream-like states. I’m interested in depicting the hallucinatory quality of a dream while still showing a sense of realism. I’m interested in knowing where the audience is transported when viewing these. I want the audience to question their own dreams and ask themselves what the difference is between dreams and their idea of what reality is. 

Does reality exist only when we observe it?   

Soohyun_Statement

In my photographs, I am acutely aware of the tension between a kind of clarity in “the thing itself” (as discussed by John Szarkowski) and a vagueness toward what it represents. The pictures often have a literal or figurative translucence, adding to or diluting intrinsic meaning. For example, buildings might be embedded in paintings, which are protected by glass. Images reflect off each other. Objects are redefined by each other, in the midst of an ongoing investigation of architectural space.  

Defined spaces or items — street paraphernalia, window displays — are turned into abstract portraits, but their true functional nature, and those of the places I capture — parking garages, horse stables — remain, like echoes. The real slips into the unreal, or surreal. At the same time, these depictions are also a conscious way of addressing personally poignant historical and cultural contexts and conflicts. 

The subjects of my photographs are drawn from concerns arising out of my immediate environment, first in Korea and now here in Chicago. In Korea I was trained over the course of a decade in an apprenticeship with a photographer who believed in traditional methods. I learned to utilize formal photographic elements to convey my innate response to my subjects. I was particularly concerned with capturing the social and political complexities arising as consequences of the fast economic development in my country and the controversial effects of the contemporary, capitalist paradigm.

My recent photographs in Chicago continue these same concerns and explore spaces of political and social tension. As a newcomer, I often wander around the city. I see traces of modernist, utopian experiments, for which Chicago was the testing ground, and yet their failure is often clearly thrown into contrast by a contemporary reality in which there is still so much injustice and inequality. As an outsider, I do not understand in which neighborhood I should feel safe or threatened, or where a certain neighborhood begins or ends. Through the photographer's lens, I delineate for myself the mystery and insecurity I feel against a backdrop of the wonder of being in this great city. 

Kevin Barrett Weil

I’m interested in slipping myself into the gestational period between the birth and death of an object or event’s ultimate trajectory. It is in this liminal highway of layered histories where I interact. I’m engaging with infrastructural elements of a commodified framework so as to locate myself within the much larger system that I’m interacting with. It is through documentation of these evidential relationships that the cause and effect nature of systemic interaction can be charted.

Often performance and documentation of said performance are synonymous. There is an action, a gesture, an occurrence, which happens with the potential to shuffle perception of what is referred to as the banal. Performance in the way I’m referring to it is an occurrence animated by decisive action. Through chance intersections of interaction marked by various points in an object or events ultimate trajectory, new meaning can be ascribed with the potential to reinvigorate pre-existing conditions with room for reinterpretation.

There is an overwhelming anxiety and groundlessness that defines the present condition. Hito Steyerl refers to the totality of this groundlessness as a free-fall. The fall goes unnoticed because everything is implicated, falling simultaneously. Thusly, it is the individual’s unconscious activity and anxiety, working constantly to orient oneself among the objects and events in free-fall. Associations are constructed based on chance relations within the idea of a particular system.

I believe that the reinterpretation of space in free-fall has the potential to posit new associations of thought and activity. Groundlessness can facilitate a nebulous play within free-fall conditions that provides a heightened sense of agency between the individual and their relation to the thing. A swimming that refers to the body and that thing the body is swimming towards, away from.

The arc of an event’s occurrence is relative to the individual’s point of entrance and exit in perceiving it. There is a slippery absoluteness that is often the result of individual experience.

The entrance is not the only entrance. There is a back door, and this too functions as an entrance. I believe that the process of locating our entrances and exits is vital to our understanding of where we are, of how we came to be there, of where we can go.

It is there deep in the web of interactivity, or maybe it is right on the surface, or maybe there is no difference, there is only that which is imposed by language and systems resultant. Because things are not so linear and upright and absolute there is an infinite room for error. It is here where the wiggling can occur. Where things spill and other things absorb the spill and those things become another thing. This is the place where places claim to be. 

RMB Manifesta (500 words)

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RMB Manifesta

My various modes of being are impermanent, as they exist within overlapping communities, social constructs, and constant paradigm shifts. I seek to come to terms with these modes and a longing for a centered sense of being. The tools I use to transcend my displacement (i.e. computers, avatars, cameras) are directly linked to other people and multiple histories, thereby problematizing the complete autonomy the tools intend to evoke.

In my work as a photographer, performer, and cultural theorist, I mash-up familiar icons and personae, disorienting myself from a conventional experience to them as a passive consumer.  Engaging the visual language of mass media, I remove the environment, leaving only the represented body and the constructed image as the spaces to reconfigure the assumed signifiers of authenticity. I fight and clamor for the camera’s gaze in an intensely meticulous process that involves creating everything from a placeless, timeless stage.

Through still lifes of books, album covers, and other mass-produced objects, I attempt to repurpose visual metaphors for construction and identity manipulation.  The architectonic forms in the still lifes become collages that distort and complicate the narratives of those who attempted to subvert oppressive paradigms, only to be reabsorbed back into them. These narratives are vital to my process of creating my own mythology, not suffering through trends of cultural consumption but fostering an oppositional gaze. With each meticulously displayed gesture, I ritualize my privilege to move this way. Putting them on display in a white cube is simply never enough, and the challenge resides in figuring out what measure of resistance is the grain of radical potential.

Following this same focus in my performance and video work, I embody what I call a “contemporary freemason,” a culturally syncretic trickster who possesses skill in repurposing symbolic meaning.  Depicting multiple roles of jester, servant, master, and creator, the self-portraits and performances intentionally reassign modes of representation as sites of resistance and choice. There is a tension between constructed fantasies and self-reflection.

By exploring the overlap between the performed and the personal, I attempt to recover a sense of agency in my own representation.  I choose to be seen through a surreal multi-conscious lens or not at all; this emphasis on self-control will inevitably be challenged and therein lies its power.  I present the black female body as a conduit to empty, fill, freeze, animate, construct, and destruct culture, even while serving as a surface upon which to project mysterious desire.

No longer the subaltern or the abject, the intact black female body dominates as the vehicle through which the possibilities of self-determi­nation and multi-consciousness manifest. The dilemma of double-consciousness will be damned.

The first memory I can recall with my mother’s father is standing with him next to the small creek on his property as he told me that I would never be permitted to call him “Grandpa”.  I had been removing leaves caught between the rocks of the creek blocking the flow of water.  He stood on the bank above me as I kept my balance by holding onto the sparse branches of a small willow tree and I asked him a question that I assume was lead with “Grandpa…” He quickly responded that “Grandpa’s” are “sick and dying, lying in hospital beds”, and made a point to tell me “I am not Grandpa.  Grandpa is dead.  I’m The Colonel.”  I don’t actually remember ever calling him Grandpa.  But I do remember how sad and confusing it was to hear those words come out of his mouth.  After that, the one or two yearly visits to The Colonel and Grandma Theresa’s were equally confusing. 

The approach to their house leaves me with a feeling of ambivalence.  As a child I loved wandering through their expansive property, but dreaded the mealtime we shared.  Over the years, each visit became more and more revolved around discussions of plans for the future, interrogations on how my brother plans to become rich, and how my sister and I should intend to “marry a rich man”.  This example so different from the one that I was raised under with my own parents, outlined my mom’s stepmother in a horrible light and deemed her a gold-digger in my eyes. 

Despite these pressures and assumptions that pinned me against The Colonel and Theresa, I feel the need to correct the wrongs we have inflicted upon each other.   I make advances to spend time with them, only to be judged or neglected once I arrive.  Their belongings become stand-ins for my grandparents as even when I’m left alone to wander their house, I’m surrounded by abstractions and portrayals of them. The guns, knives, cigars, high quality bottles of scotch, rubber waders, disheveled books and taxidermy emote my grandfather’s essence.  The highly stylized rooms, the plush pillows, the organized but obviously frequently used kitchen, the ash brimmed fireplace with a scorch speckled rug that lies in front of it—these things describe my grandmother perfectly.  The inanimate objects become my source to connect with and to learn from about my grandparents in their absence.

Kayl//Statement

I make still lifes.

I aim to decode our relationship to objects, seeking why they may carry associations of attraction and repulsion. Each item I work with has an inherent relationship to me, but also shares a separate connotation with the viewer. Therefore by isolating and depicting each object, I prompt the audience to transform them through the projections of their associations.

I intend not only to compel the audience to make free associations with objects, but also to spark a conversation about the act of taking a photograph. The viewer’s experience is vital to the photograph being able to support itself outside of the studio. When a conversation is sparked around my work, I feel as if I have reached some sort of goal, especially when that discourse branches into many different association “exercises” that reach out into pop culture, history and specific comparisons. Though I am intrinsically hinting at specific historical or photographical discourse, I am always fascinated when the mind of the viewer chooses to take them in a different direction. I mean to create imagery that works as a loose narrative that forces the audience to interact with it through contemplation. I hope that looking at my photographs initiates a peregrination of sorts, a type of image that creates a rambling stream of conscious thinking. It is a very essential part to my work that it is completed in this way by the viewer, and speaks to me about what taking a photograph can mean.

My photographs propose to raise questions not only about the objects themselves, but also about the photographer’s process in choosing and arranging these objects. Through the introduction to the artist’s studio, a conversation about the act of taking a photograph can also come into play. I attempt to be present within my work without actually taking pictures of my body. Therefore, I try to remind the viewer of the space in which the photograph was taken, and challenge them to ask under what circumstances the shutter was pushed.

I am extremely interested in my historical placement in the genre of still life art. I am constantly asking myself questions. What does it mean to make still lifes today? What does it mean to photograph still lifes, instead of painting them as the masters did? Where am I situated in the history of the genre? Why do I feel the need to continue the traditions of the genre? How do I add a new discourse to the many already surrounding still life? I intend to continue using historical still life tropes to perform new ideas that ultimately surround the genre. I am uninterested in transcending the genre, but aim to ground myself completely and fully within the still life history in order to burrow my way deeper into its meaning and importance. There is a reason a specific genre proceeds in art through generations; I intend to continually question why still life has existed for so long a period.

The photographs I make must be abstract enough to remain both objective and familiar simultaneously.

Hayden's Statement

Recently I have been exploring the unnoticed relationship between materiality and location in relation to human beings. Through surface and appearance of inanimate objects, we begin to associate certain specific connotations with the outer shells of what we see directly in front of us. But what if these shells represent and exist as nothing more than a distraction from reality? Slowly our reluctance to accept the artificial as a stand in for the real begins to dissolve, and we grow to crave the artificial representation, rather than the actual existence that is being referenced. As the artificial wears away and crumbles, we must ask ourselves what then happens to our perception of the real? Does it decay with the shell? This body of work aims to bring attention to the artificial shell present within our everyday lives, and highlight how it begins to overtake our unconscious understanding of ourselves and the world around us. / / / A tragic comedy lurks within my consciousness. It is the condition that we are all existing in. The condition that swallows us all up. The condition that has an unending appetite. / / / I was recently speaking with a friend and he was talking about how miserably sad and lonely life is as a whole. How even the ability to relate to those around us is a fetal attempt at a finite goal that will not last. Nor is it worth the effort and strain we put into it. To me, it was almost the exact opposite. Rather than see the normally forced and concise interactions that make up our day to day lives as lonely distractions from loneliness itself, I feel as though while I am teetering on the fence between tragedy and comedy, I am seeing more and more humor in the tragedy of life. Of course, this isn't quite a "lol" humor, this is the humor that causes you to laugh when you hear of an unexpected death, or when you find out that the pastor of your church was found just outside in the parking lot, receiving oral sex from one of the children's choir members. It is the humor that exists only as a result of ones sheer disgust with what they are surrounded by, and by the blatant absurdity that sniffs out the pastor, and has its way with every member of his or her family. / / / (the first part of this has been my statement for probably about 5 or 6 months. this writing was fairly rushed, and i plan to extend on it much more)

Eliot Taguiam Artist statement

I strive for honesty in my work, at any cost. I believe that in order to create a body of work worth remembering one must put in as much effort as they can in order to achieve the highest level of understanding from their viewers. That being said, my work is thought-out, planned, and executed with regard to the highest of standards - my own. Regardless of the project I undertake I always strive to produce the best image possible both conceptually and technically. This can only be achieved – I feel – if the work is honest and made with very specific intent.

My work has always been about sentimentality – whether it be my own sentiments or those of another. My portraits focus on the depth of human emotion and all that carries with it. My landscapes and still lives evoke a similar feeling of knowing – complete empathy between my subject, my audience, and myself. It is these aspects, I believe, that make my work romantic in every sense of the word. For what greater honor is there but to share an emotion with another human being.

Recently I have been obsessed with ideas of more complex emotions such as yearning, contentment, ambition, and fortitude – to name a few. I have undertaken this task because I believe that in a world filled with negative, simple, emotions to be complicated and to be a true romantic is really a radical idea.  Likewise I have begun dissecting my own emotions and thought processes. Ideas of “home” and adulthood have been at the forefront of my mind. My most recent project simply titled “Home” is an example of this investigation. Focused on my goals and expectations of myself I concluded that the saying “home is where your heart is” became an inaccurate mawkishness of human emotion. The idea of home is much more multifaceted than it appears. Through my work I have investigated what home means to me. I have found that the phenomenon of home is – in essence - where one feels of use, where one feels a sense of belonging rather than playing the roll of an outside spectator. It is this conception that has brought my work to the conclusion that the word “home” can not only be a place, but a person, a group, a practice, or even an idea. My work can be viewed as the definition of home as it manifests to me. Likewise, it is the aim of this body of work to not only articulate what home is to me, but to enable the viewer to surmise what they consider to be their home.