Ideologically encoded through the use of semiotics, advertisements posit meaning through the relational system of signs.  There is no reality outside representation, but rather a socially constructed system of meaning. Subconsciously, we are structured by this repertoire of codes and grammar of meaning that dissects binary structures.

The banality of violence. As postmodernity cannibalizes authenticity, contemporary photography oscillates from being an "archival medium" to a self-aware one. Whereas both forms lend a version of the truth- the disparity between them posits with the notion of "representation". There are endless representations of a single moment which complicate the veracity of a single photograph.

For 50 years, corporate power has been glorified, consumption championed and waste justified.  Now we stand before a precarious future.  

Contemporary cultural narratives, like ancient myths, speak to our common aspirations, anxieties, and perplexities. These ritually retold stories help to create a sense of communal identity.

Amid the onslaught of media images, we experience life as a sequence of schizophrenic moments.  Our collective consciousness has been reduced to a scattered blur that drifts from the new multiplex, the old strip mall, from one meal to the next, twitter, a text message, a coffee- medium or large, a cigarette, numbing hours of TV, all unnaturally constructed “needs”. 

Truth is lost amongst the arbitrary and insignificant objectives semiotically spun as we back sedated by the flickering screen and the false promises it proposes for the future it truncates. 

Entangled in an endless cycle of distraction, the western world inhabits the space of post-history where all grand narratives dissipate and technological dependency diminishes the tangibility of our experiences. 

The social landscape has become a noisy, fractured space dominated by advertisements. We produce scads of shiny short-lived products destined to eternally decay in the purgatory of landfills. How will history judge us?

‘The time of an instanteous presence that is no longer even the present moment in relation to a past or a future”  Baudrillard

Recognized by the Huffington Post  as “One of Fourteen Artists that are Transforming Opera”, Lisa E. Harris is a creator.  This video is a tribute to both the strength of her voice and the beauty of her person. 

The palimpsestic female body is a site where cultural phenomenology and social perversions have historically been inscribed. America's consumer society is fueled by a market that by nature must constantly develop new consumables and new consumers; as such, the body has increasingly become its terrain over the years, and larger and larger segments of women's and girl's bodies have become colonized, commodified, and reshaped by market forces.

With the end in sight now, I grope for the words to describe my experience here, but find I am lost for them. 

The more light there is the less you see. "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." Sigmund Freud

Ideologically encoded through the use of semiotics, advertisements posit meaning through the relational system of signs.  There is no reality outside representation, but rather a socially constructed system of meaning. Subconsciously, we are structured by this repertoire of codes and grammar of meaning that dissects binary structures.

How is it that a mere material manifestation of a light refractory so painfully and intimately captures a fleeting glimpse of time lost? Our view of the world is unique and cannot be shared. Memories transcends the skeleton of the past like ghost. A photograph simulates the act of seeing, it is physical product of perception. Perhaps the absence of closure is the catalyst behind my need to return.

The palimpsestic female body is a site where cultural phenomenology and social perversions have historically been inscribed. America's consumer society is fueled by a market that by nature must constantly develop new consumables and new consumers; as such, the body has increasingly become its terrain over the years, and larger and larger segments of women's and girl's bodies have become colonized, commodified, and reshaped by market forces.

The state of the spectacle empties and nullifies every real identity. In its place, the media offers ideologically infused avenues for identity construction. From the array of media text, gender roles are realized, social norms are cemented and beauty standards are established. 

When culture becomes another fetish product. The Cartesian gap between desire, memory and reality reveals how act of archiving is a result of the societal impulse to preserve the past and cement a coherent collective memory.  Photographs transform the pathological into a historical archive.  Although a product of lived experiences, the hundredth-of-a-second captured has infinite readings — the poetry of the enclosure met with the prosaic phenomenon of the minds’ need to create meaning. The complexities of this dichotomy underpin the mediums precarious relationship with reality.

….invisible suburbs, skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting.

No certainty of truth, no truth to uncertainty. The world no longer in focus. Our collective consciousness has been reduced to a scattered daze that drifts from the new multiplex to old strip mall, from one meal to the next, twitter to text message, coffee to cigarette, rush hour traffic and the fast food drive thru.

Left the window open to let outside in. The struggle is apathy, complacency, it never being enough, China, Iraq, the C.I.A. Somewhere in the numbing hours in front of the TV our life slips away between commercials, our attention still hijacked by the next new thing flickering on screen. 

Future Ruins. Presence is defined by its absence. Interested in the transient spaces and finding beauty in banality, this series solicits a recognition of the collective experience-looking at how objects wear time, details become mysterious and mundane moments go unregistered, yet internalized.       

A stop motion film following the trajectory of a road cutting across a number of continents and hemispheres, from Iceland to New Zealand, and then Australia and so on.  

Our time is one of continually deferred expectations and anxieties where tabloids provide the sustained narrative which later become history. With the boundaries between life, art and tv becoming increasingly obscured, the poverty of experience at the hands of our hyper-accelerated society comes into question.

Life is an Artificial Stage. All transcendence has disappeared, the natural world has been liquidated and substituted for an artificial one. 

You imitate the shade of my mother. Contemporary cultural narratives speak to our common aspirations, fears, and perplexities. Ritually retold, these stories reinforce a constructed history and sustained narrative that collectively we buy into. Infiltrating our collective imagination, the ideological contradiction at the heart of this myth is the delusion. The simulacrum does not hides the truth, but rather reveals its absence.

Visuals of Rajasthan, India. The revival of landscape photography in the contemporary art world begs the question of how such subject matter remains timelessly alluring yet inextricably socially harmful. Understandably, the vast and mysterious representations of nature trigger awe. The aesthetic tradition traces back to the seventeenth century wherein the act of painting the natural world became a practice adapted by the aristocratic elite.

Mad and raving through the desert of Rajasthan at dawn. illusion won’t free us from this reality, even with geographic displacement. Harm there, is harm here.  There is no escape, but still the sun rises. 

As the technical age cannibalizes the medium, contemporary photography oscillates from being an “archival medium” to a self-aware one. There are endless representations of a single moment which complicate the veracity of a single photograph. The relation of the spectator to spectacle is an intricately gendered system: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women come to define themselves according to how they feel they are perceived. A dialectic between the voyeur and the subjective- a photograph often unveils more about the photographer than the subject. This body of work speaks to the pluralities of experience, the complexities of shifting subjectivities and the absence of authorship- it is about misguided gazes, sex, loss and acceptance.

To know how much he suffered would be dear. As desertification and extreme weather patterns delimitates habitable and uninhabitable zones, it is clear that the earth can’t eternally withstand the strain of the industrialized world. Central to this work is the question of human survival in relation to nature and a global environment increasingly defined by unpredictability. 

We outgrew love. Memories of the past are dictated by the present. Although no object is counted on more for it mnemonic technology, a photograph is not inhabited by memory, but rather produces it. A fugitive testimony to a moment lost, the image painted by light counterfeits an instance. The mutability of our understanding of history unveils the role imagination and photographs plays in remembering. Identity is constructed just as much on the memories you’ve chosen to forget, like the photos of yourself you frame or tear apart - versions of yourself that are acceptable or unacceptable. This series aims to deteriorate the positivist discourse of photography’s relationship with truth and shed light on the interconnections between memory, imagery and identity by focusing on universals.