These photos are not for sharing, posting or saving. Solely for pre exhibition consideration. Thanks, Svavar
Alana: Seen just now
These photos were born in a shared space outside of the online communication that has taken over so much of our social life and experiences. They are a visual love song composed in the presence of joy, beauty, difficulties and the connection that grew only to suffer the breakdown that comes from two individuals unable to align a vision of the future, and increasingly the present. They are the memory of moments that stand as pillars of a failed invasion into inhospitable territory, where the downfall came from within.
The oasis we discovered together gave us time and space to grow stronger in our love, but eventually we had to leave and continue the journey, navigating with compasses that steered us in different directions. Yet the journey also took place within the confusing and overstimulated space of social media, where a message seems to ring out among the bombardment of todays overwhelming algorithmic invasions, as if communicating in a corner of a loud party.
But with that Pavlovian ping, when the loud madness quiets down for a split second, we digitally enter a quiet room made up of a message box, where words, emotions, desires and questions are sent and received. This is where we see and are seen. Outside the dopamine addictive content continues to splatter the living room walls that we stare at more frequently to the point of making it our daily escape, like a black hole or a supernova collapsing in on itself. The mass grows until it condenses into something too heavy to comprehend. And within those newly created spaces, we show ourselves, and hope to be seen. We either feel smaller or larger, stronger or weaker based on this simple act of reaching out online. The communication inside this universe of online existence has become faster and more impatient with a growing desire, or need for more constant affirmation and reaction.
The love letter of bygone days may well have been largely replaced by a vocabulary of memes and emojis, with an ever growing impatient wait for a reply, but still shares the human need to show our feelings, and be seen by another person. To relate and feel truly seen, with all the complications of what you reveal about yourself by doing so, and likewise, what you are shown in return.
Relationships and connections on/offline has in our culture become more intertwined with every year that passes. A new language and ways of relating to other people emerges. Some fluently master it while others struggle to find stable ground and a sense of self within it. Our online selves exist alongside every possible sort of attention grab created, for better or for worse, but the noise can be distracting, tempting, deafening and numbing to the senses. The online world pulls us in with a growing anxiety that if not within, we are apart, from something. FOMO invades our psyche on various levels.
This brave new world may be the new opiate for the masses, a reorienting of the human mind, how it experiences its existence and its place in it.
And there, within the endless variations of content that is the algorithmic mayhem of social media, we continue in our own ways to show ourselves, with a desire to see and or be seen, be it by many, or by the few that truly matter to us.
Alana: Seen just now, represent a relationship, that like most, was experienced both online and offline. But in between the photographs is the unseen timeline of the connections experienced by an anxious and overthinking mind, that found some calm from the turbulence and uncertainty it perceived, by capturing a beautiful presence through photographs. Photographs of a person that showed herself to me, and saw me.
As nothing seems to escape the black hole of social media, these images will surely find their way to an online existence with the rest of the worlds content, perhaps with the faint hope they might remind us of the priceless value of connections made in the offline realm.
To Alana, for walking with me in the desert.