I have come to the realization that my perspective of the world and consequent actions and reactions may have been molded by a digitally constructed gaze. We live in a world that is dominated by social media and the obsessive need to connect; where individuals are hyper aware of each other’s movements; where we have immediate access to the personal histories of peers or strangers; where moments are permanently catalogued as images, captions and posts; where privacy is an illusion; where reality is subjective.

The algorithms and hyper visibility that are fundamental to social media platforms may play into or amplify urges to renegotiate the presentation of self. Thus, I am interested in what happens to authenticity when every personal choice can be made public. What happens to authenticity when identities can be curated to fit the preferences of imagined audiences? How does human behavior change when actions are rated by a binary system of likes? I seek the answers to these questions by investigating the effects of digital panopticons on self-perception, self-worth and sense of scale.

My work exists as sculptures that are based on common tropes seen in film and television; scenes that are familiar but unlikely to have played out in our real lives. The objects present snapshots of daydreamt realities derived from screen-based suggestions of what is possible. By substituting the self as character, the sculptures shed light on the effort required to produce and maintain selves for an audience, and the incongruity between the lives we dreamt of, the lives we have, and the lives we present to assumed audiences. By presenting cropped representations of familiar scenes, I draw attention to the curatorial effort that is involved with the presentation of self and to the (mis)representation of identity that occurs in the digital world.