“Makeshift” was created as invited artist at Cucalorus. With this series, I endeavor to navigate the proliferation of objects found in everyday life  and to  re-interpret everyday belongings as active participants in the construction of self-identification. To this aim, I employ a variety of commonplace materials, teddy bears, monkey suits, inflatables, scarves, pyjamas, wigs and party cones, to create portraits.

Taking its cues from traditional portrait this series nevertheless uses none of its tropes. Instead, the work functions as a personal act of reappropriation.

Incorporating elements of performance and photography, I transform the sitter, which is myself, through a process of enmeshing myself with the objects.  I am concerned with their materiality and their makeshift accumulation. Everything is quite  unstable and ephemeral, in balance only for the short time it takes to freeze the moment  using a remote.

This works brings me to consider questions of subjecthood and objecthood. The final photographic prints, and their ensuing flat two dimensional representation, take on the language of collage.

I consider collage to be  an ad hoc grouping  of many types of actants such as humans and nonhumans, as well as culture. And so these three prints are a way of bringing in this question of what is the relationship of portraiture to collage and how is this inflected in everyday circumstances such as living with objects.

My studio practice is performance based and through it  I create intuitive moments which I photograph using the auto-timer. This praxis involves trial and error, and the selection of the images is curated at the end of the process.

This series speaks to how objects inherently are about sociality and addresses questions of  how  everyday objects can be re-interpreted as active participants in the construction of self-identification.

Residency curators:  Dan Brawley and Thea Fitz James.