Medium: Digital Inkjet Print / Year: 2014
In the project “Violent Skin,” I created a series of images of visual violence (one of which is presented below). Through this series, I compare two of our voyeuristic fantasies: erotic skin and the scientific representations of large populations. I projected images of populations, taken by a NASA satellite, onto my naked skin. The “subjective violence” of large-scale human migration became infused with the “objective violence” of looking. Both of these acts of objectification, eroticism and scientific research, transform human individuals into symbols: superficial representation or empty signifiers. They distance the viewer and, in an act of colorful metonymy, they turn the subject into a beautiful abstraction. The image I created is itself heavily pixilated in an attempt to foreground the frame of the screen and my own mediating presence.