I seek to confront the viewer with questions regarding identity, visual and social perspectives and the minutia of both virtual and physical environments.
The self-portraits within this work are screenshots from pop-up windows, taken from websites that I frequent. Dudesnude.com and Manhunt.net are social networking sites where gay men go to “hook-up”.
After appropriating the screenshots, I remediate them within particular physical or “real” environments that have had some connection to my sexuality. The backdrops are representations of the home in which I first developed a sexual identity, the school that I failed to gain a bountiful sexual education from, places I go to meet men and the clinic I go to get tested for STDs.
More often than not, websites like Dudesnude.com and Manhunt.net function as isolated deviations from these “real” environments— an escape. As a potential consequence, components of the self risk becoming marginalized, made secondary or even repressed into a state of denial. Bringing my online persona to the surface of particular physical environments challenges the hierarchical framework of both environments in relation to one another. It also serves to indict social perspectives of virtual and physical identity.
I push the interrogation even further by showcasing through a combination of photographic objects and lit projections; once again challenging perspective through remediation of the otherwise virtual as an object and the otherwise physical as light, manifested through digital technology.
Please note: The screenshot images within these photos were actually physically in the environments.. they were not 'photoshoped' in.
