This series, Without A Shadow, considers the body's evolution in digital representation. I use myself as the crude material for each image and from that create new characters solely from and in the digital arena. The photographs are no longer indexical to what was originally photographed and the bodies in of my characters are therefore not an impression of what existed but rather a recreation of it. In the process, I unveil that the ideal human form is reconstructable and malleable, especially today where the body is not seen as a sacred object but simply an object ready to be manipulated.
Through dissecting and transforming I am placing the body in limbo between a recognizable type and something more foreign. I do not intend to go the route of creating something that is completely unrecognizable as human, rather I wish to retain all the original features and manipulate them in such a way as to create something unnatural and unfamiliar. I want the audience to be curious about the subject, but not instantly realize why they are stopping to reconsider what they are looking at. It is integral to the project that the figures be rooted with one foot in this world and the other in the digital. They are not completely fabricated bodies because they are based in the pixels of the original photograph, but the digital process has altered how they are now classified.
I am using to my advantage the digital process of alteration and manipulation to stretch the possibility of the medium. I am also using the fact that we too readily accept what we see in front of us as the whole truth. My subjects do not exist on their own; rather each character is an echo of myself. They live partly in the moment that the picture was taken and partially in a notional space by means of digital manipulation. In order for the viewer to accept what they are seeing as true and believable, the photograph must reference something that existed, straddling both the referential and the imagined.
