Vessels

PRINT INFO
Series Title: Vessels
Medium: Photography
Media: Archival Pigment Print
Image Size: 72” x 57.6” inches (182.8 x 146.3 cm)
Except for title Lotus, which is 84” x 67.2” inches (213.3 x 170.6 cm)
Edition of 3 + 1AP
(AP not for sale)

An ongoing project, the series will comprise 12 to 15 artworks.

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STATEMENT
Vessels is my response to the recent rise of white supremacy and anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and the Western world at large.

Driven by personal histories and inquiries, Vessels documents individuals from Jackson Heights, one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods on earth, where 167+ languages are spoken, creating a site-specific visual ethnography non-exclusively referencing identity, power, race, and socioeconomic class. By documenting the "Other" passing through this single "American" location, and *this* specific habitat, I am constructing a live human archaeology of place with which I am seeking to challenge conventional notions of what it means to be an American, or if feasible, to provoke a conversation surrounding the legitimacy of the very idea of an Americanness. Because many of the individuals portrayed here are American, born on this continent, a land stretching from Patagonia to Alaska, as well as North American. And some of their ancestors have been on this continent for thirty-five thousand years.

After I had begun to aleatorily construct these photography artworks in post-production, I realized I was re-building the fragmented surfaces of trains in the sky as a metaphor for the idyllic, utopian, and delirium-induced voyages of immigrants who walk across continents or cling to makeshift rafts to cross oceans in death-defying odysseys to escape their conditions.

Vessels is how my mind feels living in my neighborhood as an immigrant, in this epoch, and in this country.

TECHNICAL NOTES
Vessels includes candid photography portraits of individuals riding the west-bound 7 train at the Junction Boulevard station in Jackson Heights, New York City. In addition to the portraits, each work includes still-life photography fragments from separate photographs of the trains’ surfaces and interiors; features and architecture from the station; dismembered American flags; and objects, detritus, street graffiti, and architecture from the surrounding neighborhood. Except for the portraits, all photographs have been aleatorily fragmented in post-production, recolored, and layered within each work with a technique that allows several layers to be viewed as occupying the same space, a development beyond collage.  Each work is composed of upward of twenty photography fragments. The series is created using a DSLR camera and two prime lenses, a 35MM and an 85mm.  Because I am interested in incorporating the Latin American mural tradition I grew up with into my fine art photography practice, I have designed a proprietary post-production protocol that allows me to create 35 inch (88.9 cm) negatives so I can make prints at 72 inches (182.8 cm) or larger that retain rich, close-up detail. The idea is to continue to expand into even larger works in future series.

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