Participant Observer

2015 - Ongoing Inkjet prints on MOAB Slickrock paper
5” x 5”
ed. 5 + 2ap

For me, 2015 marked the apogee of “selfie” culture novelty. In May of that year, Rizzoli published Selfish an almost 500 page compendium of Kim Kardashian West’s selfies. That same month Pew Research Center published a the results of a survey on American attitudes about goverment survielence. Paradigmatically, both of these represent the Faustian bargain Americans seem to have made with their privacy. For the images in Participant Observer, looked for a way to engage both of these elements. I began by photographing sections of my finger at close range with a mobile phone, uploading and manipulating the images through the popular social media site Instagram. Seeking at once to document sensitive personal information (my fingerprint) through participation in selfie culture, while grappling with the desire for privacy, these intentionally opaque "selfie" works pointedly demonstrate many of the ways we expose ourselves over the Internet. The work is an open series currently at 13 images.

Selections from this series have been shown at Lorimoto Gallery in Queens and as part of the show “Bringing Brooklyn to Norfolk” at Gallery21 in Norfolk, VA