The cultural traditions of my extended immigrant family manifest in me like a stubborn Siamese twin. I experience her as a figurative, geographic, social appendage pulling me in different directions. Yet, despite the authority she wields on me psychically, she is virtually invisible to others. Her presence in my external world is as slight as a shadow. As the daughter of immigrants, the personal experience my family’s move to this country and resulting perceptions of “place” have become the foundation of my work. That is not to say that the work manifests as a direct biography. On the contrary, my practice attempts to present ideas about spatially governed identity that are perceptually and aesthetically experienced.
Two eccentric “spaces” and their associated phenomena have influenced my recent work. The first is the flat, fleeting, and visually driven domain of our current media culture and its tools. My work is also tempered by my experience in architecture and its preoccupation with physically resolute definitions of place. Certain media – light and shadows in particular – possess the dematerialized and contingent qualities that provide corollaries for physical values that echo my thoughts. The ability of shadows to push the outline of objects out into their surrounding space, and their tenacious capacity to sustain a unique occupation of the present are only two such traits. Combining video and shadow the work’s aesthetics take on another critical dimension: that of point of view.
Using theater-lighting techniques, my work conceives of the viewer's "shadow body" as a void waiting to be filled with implicative video and photographic projections. While being an occlusion to the light, the viewer’s body, by generating a shadow, creates a figurative aperture for reaching hidden layers of imagery. Establishing the observer's body as such a gate, my work addresses not only the social contingency of her/his gazing in a space but also visualizes the notion of the body-as-screen. With the equipment and cords visible, like a space backstage, I make the players aware of the manner in which this experience is being perceptually constructed. Stepping into the line of light, a body enters and is cloaked with the structure of an illuminated narrative. This willful posturing at particular points in the room results in variably sized "shadow windows" and in numerous permutations of the projected imagery. The fillers, both photographic stills and videotaped loops, reference moments of differing length and historical time. Meanwhile, the viewer's movement in the installation space is continually regenerating these projected moments in terms of the present. By depending on this circulation, I forfeit a certain degree of control in my work, setting up a variability that affects and is described by motion, light, and image. As the viewers travel through and out of the exhibition space, the displaced layers seem to "seal themselves up" and the room returns to the state that it was when earlier entered.
In these works, the shadow exists as both subject and object in the frame of an ephemeral construction; and it is linked to the three-dimensional space of the gallery by being an unmistakable attribute of the spectator in the space. As an immigrant’s daughter, my own sense of boundaries has been tempered by not only historic “arrival” and “departure” but also in the sustained psychological oscillation between “point of origin” and “point of destination.” What results is a dual identity that remains in flux. It has no mass. It presupposes some translation as well as an occasional sense of disorientation. By inviting the figurative aperture, I attempt to supplant the spectator as the subject in a situational quandary about movement and identity. Access to this experience is gained via an intimate visual reference point: the observer's own, familiar, and engaged shadow. Landscapes are transplanted into these bodies, but only as projected against the finite edges of the gallery space. In all of this, I intend to make the viewer feel as if she or he is standing not only within layers of light, and amidst conventional architectural planes separating interior and exterior, but also in a thin space between distant geographies.
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