There is a saying that I have believed in since I was young: The eyes are the windows to the world. This quote is the philosophical foundation of my work; I want people to get to know me in this series from a different lens. Therefore, I composed a visual story about my six year journey with problematic eyesight. 

I was born with a condition called ‘Strabismus,’ a dysfunction of the muscles controlling the eye due to nerve injury. This condition, caused by farsightedness, muscle dysfunction, and family history, presented early in my childhood. It resulted in the loss of depth perception, amblyopia or ‘lazy eye,’ and decreased vision in a single eye. This meant I could not enjoy many activities as a kid: riding a bicycle, roller skating, playing any sport, or even drawing. If I did not get it fixed before my teenage years, the damage could have been permanent, and I would not have been able to drive, take photographs, paint, or do any kind of sports. During my early life, I saw the world in a very shallow, distorted view. I am grateful that my parents and my ophthalmologist agreed on a surgery to fix my eye muscles, and I was given a second chance. 

Mátia is dedicated to commemorate this part of my life journey. I use a variety of camera lenses and photography skills to portray these memories. The two main techniques are prism and macro photography. Prism photography involves putting reflective and refractive objects in front of the camera lens to create blurry, ever-changing effects. Macro photography highlights small details I couldn’t see before and now am able to view. I continue my concept with my choice of frames. A floating acrylic frame is the perfect choice for my show, as the gallery lights hit my frame, it refracts the light and creates little highlights of rainbow around the edges. 

I hope Mátia brings you through a journey where you see the beauty in imperfection like I did. Embracing my flaws was one of the bravest things I have ever done, and so can you!

THERE IS NO LINEAR

“Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.”

― Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Time is no longer linear. We have so much information at our fingertips that exists all at once. A prime example of this is social media where you can see a post from an hour ago, a day ago, a week ago, or even years ago all within the span of five minutes. Because we are used to seeing all of these images over and over again, they have become transparent to us. We have been trained to scroll past images and not stop to actually look at them and absorb the information embedded in them.

In this series, I have taken my base images into photoshop to select sections of the sky and replaced them with new sky photos from different times of day and different seasons. This technical effect portrays the fracturing of time throughout the image. I take the concept even further by printing my finished works on a transparent surface and shining light through them. Creating this type of transparent and reflective installation forces viewers to see through all of the information contained in these photographs in a new light, all at once. 

This concept of my work was inspired by two authors.  Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography explores his ideas concerning cameras as apparatuses. Cameras keep evolving to the point where everybody has one in their pocket. These cameras are doing most of the work; we just need to click a button. Flusser explains how the camera is continually trying to override the creator, posing the question to photographers of “how can the photographer take back control?”. Katherine Miller’s article The 2010s Broke Our Sense of Time explores similar ideas of how technology impacts our perception of time. She writes about the devaluing of images due to social media and the widespread use of cameras today. The more we see an image (or same kinds of images), the more desensitized we are to them, and they become transparent to us. 

I want to force people to stop scrolling and take in all the information in the images . The technique that I have been using was inspired by the artist Alex Hyner and his work, especially his image titled Twenty Skies. He uses photoshop to achieve  a fractured sky look, replacing a single sky with other sky images in these sections. I learned from this technique and brought my own concept, art style, and printing methods to create my showcase.