My work is grounded in experimentation with digital media. I strive to create art that pushes the current well-known uses or applications of a medium, and specifically through installation, screen-based, and print work. My explorations range from textual interactive pieces to sculpture with embedded electronics to digital photography. The subject matter of my recent work is cities and public space. Grounded in my background as a multicultural and bilingual person who grew up in several countries, each trip I take serves as a sort of artist residency, during which I set out to document those – at times – foreign locations and cultures.

Analyses on film and photography often characterize the photograph as a still image and film as a sequence of images[i]. As a practice-based researcher and digital artist challenge the line between still and moving image, engaging with photography as a time-based medium and creating work that I believe should be situated within the realm of media arts than in the more traditional label of photography. I use the production of my artworks as an opportunity to capture, redefine and represent space and time. I push the boundaries of photography via techniques such as pairing and layering (digitally and physically), pushing it far away from the realm of the “still image”.

“Time has begun to be experienced as something infinitely elastic, in which the relationship between past, present, and future becomes open to human intervention. Similarly, space is no longer a static field that we traverse over time, but has become a medium to be dismantled and reassembled at will.”[ii] My recent photography work challenges time and space, and uses the camera as a tool to create process-intensive artwork that goes beyond static framed prints mounted on a wall. Specifically, as a time-based media artist, I am interested in photography as a tool (and not necessarily a medium) to create works that push the traditional boundaries of space and time questioning how “still” an image actually is. “Photography has become almost invisible”[iii] and it is this invisibility that the following techniques challenge, by creating work that will slow down the viewer so that the work regains its visibility.

In my ongoing project Hidden Choreographies (of which Pompidou From Above, 6 Seconds is the first completed body of work) I focus on the movement of people in public urban spaces. These spaces are captured as stages, and pedestrians in them as actors. The decisions people make to linger, walk through quickly, or diverge from a straight diagonal path are the hidden choreographies that I wish to represent through digital collaging. As described by Michel De Certeau, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”[iv] The urban landscape is continually in motion (via its pedestrians) and it is this motion that I seek to document.

outsideIn is a series of printed diptychs focused on how the globalization of architecture has homogenized public streetscapes often via the presence of highly reflective glass and other mirror-like surfaces in urban hubs such as New York City, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Each work starts with a photograph of a public urban space that exemplifies this prevalent use of materials. All taken as spontaneous (non-staged) street photographs, I search for façades or other physical elements that blur the boundary between inside and outside, the private and the public. I am also interested in surfaces that question the physical architecture of a building, often layering elements from surrounding structures or public space itself.

Cross Urban is an ongoing collaboration since 2008 with Tokyo-based Colombian artist Klaus Fruchtnis. We take turns each week picking a word from a dictionary to which we each respond with a photograph. The works we are producing are groups of two images plus the word and its definition. We share an interest in time, space, and cities, and through this collaboration have been able to expand the “language” and “meaning” of each of our photographs.

This process intensive work begins with the selection of a word, continues with my taking a photograph, but does not end until I see both of our images next to the word, and extend this visual conversation with Klaus into a verbal one. After 50 groupings we have started to identify the commonalities and differences in our photographic vocabulary and become particularly excited when our images, although taken independently and often in cities thousands of miles apart, are eerily similar.

Finally, in Commuters I focus on the spaces through which people travel. Airports, train and bus stations, and subway platforms are non-places[v] – they have no function other than to facilitate the flow of people from one point to another, and it is this flow that I look to capture. Rarely presented as a single image, I am keen on representing an extended period of time and accomplish this through groupings of photographs just moments away in time from one another, as well as through physically layered images in light boxes.

In my light boxes I challenge the notion that “the photograph is thought to extract a moment from the flux of time, to cut out a slice of a time-space continuum and thus to have no duration of its own – in a sense a photography only lasts as long as we are looking at it.”[vi] Furthermore, the work challenges the classic notions that in photography one experiences equilibrium of our physical world’s “rhythm.”[vii] Instead, each layer may contain such an image, yet their superposition onto one another breaks it, and the viewer finds himself or herself in constant motion – moving from one layer to the next as they experience one space over time. In some works the amount of variation from one layer to the next can represent the chaos experienced in those few seconds, yet in others the movement seems non-existent.

The intention with all of these works is to slow down the viewing of the photograph and to move the viewer inside the image. While people are very accustomed to looking at photographs from their standpoint (an external one, often in a gallery setting, in front of the image), the shift from left to right in dyptichs and groupings, or from one layer to another in my light boxes require that people’s point of view shift from that of an external viewer to an internal one.

Please, come in.