Breathe

What does it mean to be me? Is it my body? My being? My existence? What does it mean to be ‘I’? How I situate myself is entirely dependent on my own interpretation of the word ‘I’. I cannot tell you how to interpret the word ‘I’. What happens to the word ‘I’ when you read it? Can I be in a photograph and yet disappear from it? Where do I go if my likeness is not captured and rendered directly into the photograph? What is the correlation between being present and being visible? What is the space between ceasing to be visible and ceasing to exist?

I lie on the ground with a camera on my chest in a room lit only by a single light fixed above the lens. I bear the camera’s weight as I breathe. It is hard to forget about your breath when you carry the weight of something on your chest. I breathe in, I pause, I breathe out. I continue to breathe.

I am present
I am not seen
I am

(2023)

In 2023, from May 3rd to July 22nd, Breathe was installed as a part of the 2023 University of Toronto Master of Visual Studies Program Graduating Exhibition at the Art Museum in Toronto.

Breathe approaches the photographic self-portrait as a means of making visible the invisible self that lies beneath the particulars of one's likeness. Specifically, this work explores how the photographer’s presence might be performed and registered in a photograph as a phenomenon that transcends semiotics. Each of the four images in the installation presents my presence with the least possible form, in the hope that this reduced impression creates a space for empathy and self-reflection on the viewer’s part. Breathe asks if a sense of selfhood can be evoked photographically, and be shared with others– to be felt by them in some way. Breathe puts equal emphasis on the performance involved in taking a photograph and on the performance involved in viewing one. The installation is designed to reduce sensory distractions around the act of viewing and to reveal the fragility or liminality of the images’ coming into being within the viewer’s awareness.