Vessels

This series 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 May of 2019. 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 it. 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, with Vessels, I am interested in documenting individuals from one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods on earth (160+ languages are spoken in Jackson Heights), 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. An 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 calibrating both camera and lens and using photography fragments as painting-like brushstrokes in themselves in a conscious exercise to imitate [art] painting techniques. On an non-tangible note, these works are gleamed by metaphysical concepts extrapolated from pre-Columbian art Muisca art sand and cosmologie from the Americas and from Jorge Luis Borges fiction.  

PRINT INFO
Series Title: Vessels
Medium: Photography
Media: Archival Pigment Print
Image Size: 72” x 57.6” inches (182.8 x 146.3 cm)
Edition of 3 + 1AP
(AP not for sale)
An ongoing project, the series will comprise 12 to 15 works.