Connection Series: Artist's Statement

During this year, I made series of paintings addressing the lack of sensory experience in internet communication, and how this lack applies to human relationships which occur in this fragmented, hyper-visual realm.

I began my process by taking pictures of a computer screen while it streamed webcam conversations between me and my husband. The photographs I selected to paint were partly those that I took of my husband, and partly those that he took of me. By combining them, I felt that the project approached a collaborative effort on our part, as well as an attempt to show each other what it is that we see, and how we experience each other while we are apart. There is so much that is frightening, beautiful, ugly and foreign to us as we see our conversation imperfectly translated into a distorted digital language-one that has no literal equivalent to touch, smell, taste, or satisfaction. One that highlights absence.

Translating all of these observations into paint allowed me to put some aspect of what I saw back into them. I feel that the paintings succeeded in conveying a sense of our longing, our horror, and our love.