Within my photographic and sculptural practice, I seek out and use the limitations of photography through material and photographic experimentation to destabilize the photograph’s power as truth and as concrete manifestations of the gaze. I respond to the generations of women in my family who have a deeply fraught relationship with photography; they scratched themselves out of color slides and refused to be photographed. I see their battles with this medium as a result of the expectations, sexualization, and limitations imposed upon women. I respond not only to their stories, but also to the broader lineage of women who have faced scrutiny based on gender and whose bodies have been instrumentalized for centuries. My work emerges from this deeply entrenched dynamic as a way to process, critique, and slip through the cracks within the patriarchal structure.
Black Box (2025 – ongoing) blends the previous sculptural use of photographic paper with newly incorporated modifications to the physical camera. I use a lensless camera to photograph my skin, resulting in abstract color fields. These are printed and then sculptured back into bodies, all referencing my own, as a way to eschew the predatory gaze. Similar to Black Box, Vanishing Point (2025 – ongoing) examines the mechanics of photography through the use of stereoscopes and sterocards. I collage images of my body and skin into three-dimensional geometric line drawings from the mid-1800s to destabilize the gaze on the female body. Each side of the manipulated sterocard has a different collage which, when viewed through the stereoscope, creates a dissonant virtual image. The representations of architectural space and form become a site in which the body can never be fully grasped.
Throughout my practice, I co-opt the camera to create a space of possibilities in an ever-evolving negotiation between my body and the photograph. In working with the camera, I use it outside of prescribed methods and bring historic viewing strategies into the present. Rather than re-performing the patriarchal gaze, with each intervention, I am reimagining the ways we see women and their bodies.
