Exploded View

“The clock that runs is the one that counts deaths” —Ai Weiwei

Even before the various upheavals of 2020 (global pandemic, mass demonstrations against police violence), my work was concerned with the way individuals experience crises on a collective level, and how we respond to them from a distance. This often led me to consider how events are relayed and consumed through social media, broadcast news, and other networks of image/information transmission. Now, our collective condition is defined by distance, and our common calamity is one of transmission. The global pandemic, riots and demonstrations, conspiracy theories, political polarization, distrust of government: all of them move at the speed of a virus replicating itself in the public host, the body politic. 

We have the feeling that events are occurring at a faster pace, that history itself is accelerating. It seems that every week we absorb a year’s worth of tumultuous change. The news cycle is no longer measured in hours or minutes, but an endless continual “now” that collapses and flattens time. A global Infinite Scroll. It’s also completely bespoke, crafted algorithmically to fit the bias and desire of each individual.  

It’s ironic, but if what we desire is some stability underlying this constant flux, then there is a kind of freedom in apocalyptic thinking, in recognizing the void at the end of time. This explains at least partly the persistent fascination with religion, conspiracy theories, and alien invasion movies. Eschatology is sexy. The work I’m doing now is a response to all of this. I’m using the contradictions—the rifts at the heart of experience and the disorder underlying history—as a lens to translate experience into images. The current body of work is an antidote to speed as it requires slowness and reflection. It’s also a remedy for boredom because it exposes simple narratives as false idols and asks the viewer to participate in the construction of new meaning.