Research Statement
There is an innate connection between the self and the space it inhabits— have you ever heard of the film Silverado? It’s an 80s western my dad really enjoyed; I still have not watched it, but this is where my parents found the name ‘Paden’. The innocuous intention of my parents to bestow me with an unusual name was for me to be unique as well. It’s appropriately American for my name to be from the canon of Westerns as the single most culture-defining genre of American films. My family are unabashedly nuclear Americans, with cultural identities tied to a concept of a non-existent utopian place, introducing a relationship between space, media, and identity. Navigating space is to orient your ‘self’, however space is a problematic subject.
Primarily my research seeks connections between the common image catalog of film, television, photographs, and video games, and its place in defining our relationship to space. The ubiquitous nature of contemporary image serves as a signifier for a meta-language. There is no ‘the picture of Disneyland’, just ‘a picture of Disneyland’, developing a language of infinite perspectives, experiences, and potentials. This hungry condition leads to a feast of never-ending image feeds, searches, and sequels; when there is nothing left to consume, then we must make more of course. For these reasons, my work typically takes the form of digital collage to peel away infinitely thin, virtual layers of experience, adhere them to the same canvas, then deconstruct and rebuild images with one another. Rather than hiding the action of manipulation, the manipulation becomes the image as a means to adhere self and place together.
To navigate space there is a process of understanding ‘our place’ within, around, or among them. The process has no clear beginning or end, but remains constant. Whether physical, virtual, hyperreal, or liminimal in nature, the conflation of spatial experience simultaneously rifts the human experience and reassembles it anew. As a condition of culture, the human experience is rarely subject to just one of these spaces. Before I go camping, or even try a different grocer, I look at pictures, seek reviews, gauge it’s distance to other landmarks, ask friends and family about it, piece it together with contextual clues from social media, and make a slew of suppositions. This introduction heavily weighs the experience when I physically arrive. I might flippantly exclaim commonalities like ‘it looked bigger in the movies’, or ‘pictures don’t do it justice’, as a type of evidential affirmation of the experience.
I am interested in works operating within these intersections of American identity, relationships to space or place, and visual media's impact on defining identity in an increasingly disconnected yet global environment. Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place provides robust definitions and guides for understanding operations and navigation in space. Jean Baudrillard’s seminal texts Simulacra and Simulation, and America, reinforce contemporary notions of American space as frameworks for the theoretical relationship between visual media and the shared understanding of the world around us. Marc Augé’s Non-Places identifies place subjectively on human experience, which pairs nicely alongside Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time identification of humans as wholly inseparable from the technology we create. My research led me to a variety of artist’s, most notably Mary Anne Kluth, Letha Wilson, Andy Goldsworthy, and Aram Bartholl whose visual works explore land art themes, the sublime, conflations of virtual space, and how photographs fill a special nook between these concepts.
Currently I am developing a body of collaged photographs intersecting ideas of space and identity within the home and roles of domesticity, as well as individual works using themes of language, translation, and the meta-language of contemporary virtual culture (memes, emojis, Twitch chat).