| Asa photographer outside of a photography program, my MFA study is an exploration of the medium at a distance. The work has led me to the photographic: a set of qualities by which photography operates in ways unseen in photographs themselves. My post-media approach opens up the use of a variety of materials while never really requiring me to leave my home medium. Working in this way, I make visible photography’s peculiarities and blindnesses, in particular its claim as a transparent window to the real and to documentation. The culmination of my study is the construction of an installation artwork that includes photographs, but foregrounds what is absent in them: contextuality, physicality, and dormant memory. The installation, titled Joyce Ignites the Universe, acts as a quasi-historical interpretive exhibit presenting a counter-history of photography “written” by an unseen allegorical mother figure. The same figure allows me to situate myself as an artist––in history––and inheritor of a photographic practice. Key Words: Photography, Post-media, Installation, History, Deconstruction |