Series of 9
ARTIST STATEMENT
"The work is comprised of photographic images displayed with an array of light-boxes. In creating the images, I enlisted the participation of friends, acquaintances, and strangers to pose with a circular mirror held in front of their faces, reflecting the blinding glare of the sun directly towards the camera lens. The heads of these ‘subjects’ exploded in a corona of light, with their clothes, bearings, and background settings as the only legible markers of who they might be. In this, I place attention to the ‘background’ or ‘field of forces’ that configure the encountered Other - marking the subject at the same time it places it under erasure. I’m interested in turning exploding the punctum of the face as the place of recognition into a vanishing point, the very place where identity slips free of reductive representation and 'selfhood' becomes an ever-open term. "
-words by Poklong Anading/Jose Perez Beduya
"Photography primarily operates on light as an image is processed the way the eyes perceive things. It is from this principle in which the camera obscura functions and all other similar devices work - light is passed through the pinhole of a dark chamber thence an image is projected through several layers of lens and reflected back on a photo-sensitive surface. It is from this principle that the work, 'Anonymity' is based. Although the work involved taking photographs of groups or individual people, nonetheless it became a picture of light as their identities are erased by light reflected by the mirrors they are holding. The group or individuals thus appear as a constellation of flashes. Hence, the work is an inversion of a photographic genre (portraiture) and an exploration for true photography, which is capturing light."
-words by Lena Cobangbang
