STUDIES IN BLACK AND LIGHT - 2023
The absence of color brings attention to the form: light, shadow, line, and the strange architecture of body and skin meeting water.
Each image begins as a body and ends as something else entirely. The water's surface becomes a second lens, doubling the figure, folding it in half, splitting it into shapes that no longer resemble a person so much as an organism observed for the first time. A hand becomes a wing. A torso becomes a column of light. A spine becomes a coastline. The reflection is not an effect layered onto the image; it is the subject.
I am drawn to this collapse between human and form, the moment a body becomes so abstracted that it asks to be looked at the way one looks at something unfamiliar, an alien shape, a specimen, a question rather than an answer. And yet traces remain. A tattoo surfaces through the distortion like a memory refusing to dissolve, proof that even in total abstraction, identity persists beneath the surface.
Studies in Black and White is an exercise in seeing the body as object before I let myself see it as person again. It asks how much a form can be broken apart by reflection and water before it becomes something new, and how much of the self survives that transformation regardless.
Each image begins as a body and ends as something else entirely. The water's surface becomes a second lens, doubling the figure, folding it in half, splitting it into shapes that no longer resemble a person so much as an organism observed for the first time. A hand becomes a wing. A torso becomes a column of light. A spine becomes a coastline. The reflection is not an effect layered onto the image; it is the subject.
I am drawn to this collapse between human and form, the moment a body becomes so abstracted that it asks to be looked at the way one looks at something unfamiliar, an alien shape, a specimen, a question rather than an answer. And yet traces remain. A tattoo surfaces through the distortion like a memory refusing to dissolve, proof that even in total abstraction, identity persists beneath the surface.
Studies in Black and White is an exercise in seeing the body as object before I let myself see it as person again. It asks how much a form can be broken apart by reflection and water before it becomes something new, and how much of the self survives that transformation regardless.