All At Once: Digital Photography
Artist Statement
As an artist, I have a keen interest in portraying randomness, uncertainty, and the experience of seeking knowledge. As a physicist at Cornell University, I address similar concerns, although from a different perspective. For me, creating sculpture allows me to express my analytic tendencies in a poetic way.
In my series of images, “All at Once,” I have used maps as a metaphor for constructed knowledge. Maps are useful tools that show us certain facts about the landscape we inhabit, but they also suggest how much we do not know. Following a map in an unfamiliar city, one soon realizes the wealth of detail missing from the map: colors of houses, graffiti on walls, people on the streets. For my images, I have taken found maps and distorted them by folding them into three-dimensional geometric forms, which become the subject of my photographs, scans, and photomontages. Through this manipulation, the maps fulfill their purpose as false prophets of certainty, while exposing the empty space around them that awaits exploration.
