Artist Statement:
All the individuals from Transvest were not photographed directly. Rather, they are appropriated and recycled images of people whose gestures evoke some sense of de ja  vu.

I use cut-outs of these individuals, treating them as objects or toys. The cut-outs are placed on a stage and back-lit to create silhouettes that obstruct their identities – faces, bodies, and clothing. Using both traditional and digital methods of photo-collage, I superimpose other images over the silhouettes, culled from varied sources like personal photographs, pictures taken from satellites, and newspaper clippings. The subject matter ranges from the old to the new, and the minute to the gargantuan, including baroque decorations, water ripples, mountain slopes, candy, ruins, tattoos, crowds, cars, insects, parades, a balloon bursting, and so on. Each figure envelopes a universe.

From a distance, the silhouettes are merely that. When encountering the photographs close-up, what appears to be fabric from afar are actually fragments of our reality. The interior of a mosque replaces what was lace work, denim is replaced by space photos of the earth, which in turn appear as microscopic molds, thereby removing it further and further from the original representation.

Paradoxically, each gesturing silhouette embodies a form of language yet also contains a world of chaos, made up of fragmented speech and images. Our vantage is thus suspended between two contradictory things.

Transvest itself is a nonsensical, invented word that references the distinction between masculine and feminine clothes, rendering this gender classification moot. The silhouettes are mimicries of the human form, not the original, but a simulacrum. As the origin of painting stems mythologically from the mimesis of a lovers cast shadow on the wall by candlelight, so too the Transvest figures are a projection of the human form depicted near and distanced from any semblance of reality.