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At Once Here & There

At Once Here & There [2020]

Interested in exploring the notion of “orientation” as discussed in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology * , and bringing my own experience as a transnational migrant, the ‘At Once Here & There’ explores the disorientation that comes with feeling as if one is living in two places at once. In an attempt to define this state, I turned an encounter with a familiar and seemingly banal place in the real world into a strange experience. Playing with visual perception and the experience of looking, I used light and form to render the banal as uncanny.

Leveraging the tension between physical experience and the mediated experience of familiar objects, the project conveys intangible feelings of queerness and displacement. The work is comprised of two looped video projections, paired with a set of lightbox prints. The projected videos depict found sculptural objects that are slowly revealed in fragments through the play of light. Each video piece is generated from a series of still photographs that dissolve into one another.

Interspersed with the video projections are lightboxes placed directly on the ground. Each lightbox holds a photograph of tree branches against the sky. Shot from below looking up, a gap is visible where the branches don’t meet. The gaps correspond with the forms and reflected surfaces depicted in the videos. My intention is to complicate the process of looking and of recognition, through the use of strategies like reversal, inversion, animating still images and using light to play with the form and texture of objects. In doing so, I am playing with our sense of familiarity with objects and space to create an experience of disorientation.

Projected at human scale, the videos create an immersive experience, highlighting the affective quality of non-human objects. In contrast to the two video pieces, the lightbox prints are smaller in scale, guiding the viewer to walk up close and along a path in order to experience them. Placed around the two screens, the lightbox prints and video projections become sculptural objects that enable the viewer to walk through them and move around the space.

‘At Once Here & There’ is staged to mimic the experience of walking in a real place and to encourage absorptive encounters with objects. Installed in a darkened room, the light that emits from the projections and lightboxes is used to transform the space into something uncanny, and to invite the viewer in. The projected screens are placed directly on the floor of the gallery to both alter the space as well as amplify the videos through their reflection in the floor surface. By creating and staging hybrid scenarios, in which the work hovers between media (photography and video, sculpture and photography), the project attempts to create the experience of being in two places at once.

* Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

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At Once Here & There [2020]

Interested in exploring the notion of “orientation” as discussed in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology * , and bringing my own experience as a transnational migrant, the ‘At Once Here & There’ explores the disorientation that comes with feeling as if one is living in two places at once. In an attempt to define this state, I turned an encounter with a familiar and seemingly banal place in the real world into a strange experience. Playing with visual perception and the experience of looking, I used light and form to render the banal as uncanny.

Leveraging the tension between physical experience and the mediated experience of familiar objects, the project conveys intangible feelings of queerness and displacement. The work is comprised of two looped video projections, paired with a set of lightbox prints. The projected videos depict found sculptural objects that are slowly revealed in fragments through the play of light. Each video piece is generated from a series of still photographs that dissolve into one another.

Interspersed with the video projections are lightboxes placed directly on the ground. Each lightbox holds a photograph of tree branches against the sky. Shot from below looking up, a gap is visible where the branches don’t meet. The gaps correspond with the forms and reflected surfaces depicted in the videos. My intention is to complicate the process of looking and of recognition, through the use of strategies like reversal, inversion, animating still images and using light to play with the form and texture of objects. In doing so, I am playing with our sense of familiarity with objects and space to create an experience of disorientation.

Projected at human scale, the videos create an immersive experience, highlighting the affective quality of non-human objects. In contrast to the two video pieces, the lightbox prints are smaller in scale, guiding the viewer to walk up close and along a path in order to experience them. Placed around the two screens, the lightbox prints and video projections become sculptural objects that enable the viewer to walk through them and move around the space.

‘At Once Here & There’ is staged to mimic the experience of walking in a real place and to encourage absorptive encounters with objects. Installed in a darkened room, the light that emits from the projections and lightboxes is used to transform the space into something uncanny, and to invite the viewer in. The projected screens are placed directly on the floor of the gallery to both alter the space as well as amplify the videos through their reflection in the floor surface. By creating and staging hybrid scenarios, in which the work hovers between media (photography and video, sculpture and photography), the project attempts to create the experience of being in two places at once.

* Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.