Ayngel
(2013 - present)
Working across disparate photographic strategies – documentary, narrative, experimental – Ayngel poses questions about representation, recollection, and affect. Utilizing book forms, prints, and installation, the work seeks to explore the emotional and material construction of personal identity. It is an exercise within the bounds of the photographic medium that reflexively questions the shortcomings and deficiencies of that medium to describe a subject, and a counterpoint to the presumption that it is possible to reflect an individual accurately or entirely in a selection of “straight” photographs. The work tries repeatedly, and elliptically, to represent its titular subject, and in the process highlights the inherently fragmentary nature of depiction.
Between visits, text and phone exchanges, and epistolary correspondences, I developed a relationship with Ayngel, an American gas-station attendant and former artist, after a chance encounter in 2013. These exchanges provided opportunities to listen, inquire, observe, and, in turn, absorb his perspective and lived experience. These tandem processes – one legible in images, the other more complicated and subtle – began to lend the work a poly-vocal quality. Ayngel, in turn, is a blend of our perspectives, a reflection on our similarities and differences, and a meditation both on human connection and the autobiographical nature of artistic production. The work revels in conflation, mixing Ayngel’s images with my own photographs, Ayngel’s writing with my own text, not in an effort to steer Ayngel’s story, but rather an organic mirroring, a semi-collaborative fiction-making, and an earnest reflection of the ways in which a chance encounter with a stranger can lend to a profound recognition of human connection.
At its core, Ayngel celebrates the potential of this connection and, in rendering it, strives to inspire empathy and deeply reflect on a common creative spirit.