a boundary, a demarcation

Jack Straw Gallery, Seattle, WA | solo exhibition | 2022

artist statement:

i’ve never trusted the un-self-conscious assurance of a photograph. its insistence of truth. entitlement in its own right to act as record-keeper. anyone who has tried to capture the beauty of the moon through their cellphone lens, upturned to the night sky, knows that images, so often, fail. even when they don’t fail, they flatten. make convenient, consumable, exploitable, and replicable lives and moments that are often much more complex, nuanced, and storied. 

fixated on the preservation of history, the interpersonal and cultural, photography is a natural way for me to document my life and the people in it, especially trips i have taken back to panjab - a place i was born in, but never lived. these photographs have been absent from my artistic practice until now. 

using a new material method that allows me to use and display, while simultaneously obscuring, manipulating, and duplicating parts of an image, i hope to expand and complicate, make three-dimensional and nuanced, a moment captured through a lens. by adding audio and video elements, i hope to create an immersive experience that enlivens and reanimates an image that otherwise might feel static. a person made object made (hopefully) person again. through this work, i interrogate ideas of the authority of the image, the preciousness of a foggy or fading memory, and the beauty in the longing for a solidity of cultural history that will never manifest or reveal itself. 

what emerges in the liminal space between dream, image, and memory? what can we find when we embrace the possibility of the question instead of continuing to search for the answer?