The following photographs are documentation of my installation in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery at Columbia University during the First-Year MFA Exhibition, organized by Fia Backstrom.

The title “subject object” refers to the fluctuation that one undergoes in the process of coming to terms with their identity. Throughout this process, one employs language in service of this urgency, but this mediation is comprised of mutable and interchangeable devices that demand interpretation. Within this layering of experience and meaning through time, the self becomes a complicated patchwork of unconsciously absorbed ideology, conscious and unconscious self-serving and self-effacing manipulations of memory, genetically encoded idiosyncrasies, and chance fluctuations in perception.

In the process of determining identity, the subject fluctuates from the agent responsible for interpreting and articulating experience to the object of the very language that has been employed.

This installation includes many devices to address this phenomenon. The double portraits of my father, entitled “sonfather,” reproduce the aforementioned fluctuation from subject to object, father to son, by way of the audience’s relationship to the work—while the audience stands before the photographs, their gaze is caught by that of one of the portraits. Meanwhile, in their peripheral vision, the other portrait sits wanting, awaiting the gaze to turn on him. Since the eye can only focus on one point at a time, the physical limitations of the audience's gaze allow for my conceptual motivations to be manifested in the presence of the work.

Next in the installation, hanging from the ceiling, is a photograph of a page from an anatomy book for the blind. Projecting onto the photograph is an image of the same photograph, producing an illusion that complicates the origin of the image—an illusion that is broken by the audience as they walk through the projection beam. The word ‘uvula,’ written in Braille on the original document, has been drilled through the black print of equal size mounted opposite the photograph. Because the photograph was taken of the reverse side of the original textbook page, the holes spell uvula in Braille on the reverse side, in the field of black, punctuated by the light of the projection shining through word uvula, or that which allows our voice to be heard.

Sitting atop the pedestal from which the projection emerges is a light box with a stack of transparencies separated by magnets. The piece is entitled, “I am nothing but my story is nothing.” On the transparencies are graphic interpretations of the letters in the piece’s title. In superimposing these letters, the basic information embedded within the Braille is negated much like the meaning within the sentence has been cancelled out. But there is still a sentence, there is still a structure, and the gesture remains.

Below the light box, within the pedestal is a cast of my face, a subject, waiting to become the object of the audience’s touch.

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