ARTIST STATEMENT

The internet is blue. From hyperlinks on hardcoded web pages to more than 30 percent of all corporate logos circulating online, blue defines the internet’s pathways and represents its vital signs. In the world of images, the color signals wealth, the divine, and the nebulous promises of technology. From tech-bro Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes to decentralized “photographers” on Instagram posting #glacierporn, there is no escaping blue.

I make art about the slippery relationship between images and objects by using content sourced from North Atlantic / Polar ecologies, heroic myths, dynamic systems, ice, and the internet’s obsession with all things blue. My image-based, sculptural, and site-specific projects visualize tech-centered shifts in contemporary cultural paradigms—landing in a continuum between IRL and the virtual.

To queer the contemporary reperformance of colonial image-making, I appropriate blue photos of blue places to produce speculative objects. Within these conditions, I critique the historic polar explorer’s imperial gaze and undermine their self-constructed legacies. This process questions the extractive nature of using the landscape to exchange digital clout for social currency in the midst of a climate crisis. My personal transfixtions further narrow the focus—the performative body, data as the new divine, cyberspace, and the way a place thinks about another place.

The generated works consider the materiality and tradition of formal photography in relationship to information exchange and mediated geographies. Together the projects form a visual network encoded with concepts specific to media culture—the proliferation and consumption of images online, social feedback, gratuitous thoughts and prayers, and the development of picture-making on the internet.