Vessels

An ongoing series slated to comprise 12 to 15 works, Vessels includes candid photography portraits of individuals riding the west-bound number 7 train at the Junction Boulevard station in Jackson Heights (New York City). In addition to the portraits, each work also includes still-life photography of the trains’ surfaces and interiors, of features and architecture from the train station, of the architecture surrounding the train station, and of the sky above. Except for the portraits, all other 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. 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.

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 [not exclusively] referencing identity, power, race, and socioeconomic class. By documenting individuals passing through this single American location, and *this* specific habitat, I am constructing a live human archaeology of place with which I hope 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.

Technically, I am experimenting with the aleatory disassembly of the photograph in post-production following a need to create visual meditations on being and the state of human consciousness. A technical effort is made to imbue each work with a visual rendering of bi-dimensional space as a metaphor for the kind of compartmentalized carpet-bomb-minimalism we are experiencing today, and as an effort to involve the viewer in the conceit that these are deconstructed non-fiction symbols and works. I am borrowing visual language from the art [painting] canon, calibrating both camera and lens and using photography fragments as painting-like brushstrokes in themselves in a conscious exercise to invoke [art] painting techniques. On an non-tangible note, these works are gleamed by metaphysical concepts extrapolated from the ritual art and cosmologies of the Muisca, a pre-Columbian people from South-America, and from Jorge Luis Borges fiction.  

Each artwork here is finished and ready for sale and each has its own story. Sign up for my newsletter below to be privy when the series is done and all individual stories are written here. Please reach out for any questions or inquiries.

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 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 works.