j u s t t h e s u r f a c e | A.I.R. Gallery | November 19 — December 19, 2021
This exhibition is comprised of multiple series of photographs and sculptures that play with the opacity of images. Interwoven throughout the gallery, these works grapple with the largely invisible labor and narratives embedded beneath an image’s surface. Despite the popular assumption that images tell stories, this work points to the fact that they often obscure as much as they elucidate.
Most of the objects present in the exhibition started as images. Chair after ADO toys (2021), for example, stems from a photograph of a chair that intrigued me. After further research, she was surprised to discover that the chair pictured was in fact a toy made on the scale of a dollhouse. Even more intriguing, the toy was fabricated in the Netherlands in the 1930s by young adults recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium. While this fraught history is inextricable from the object represented, its image renders the narrative obscure.
In my photography, I'm drawn to documenting surfaces, textures, and sites that similarly hold inaccessible stories. The incongruity, absurdity, and banality of minor events are recorded in the image. The photographs show evidence of human presence but never give us access to the hands that left the marks.
