VIRTUAL MIRAGE
I’m interested in the mirage as a taunting illusion. It often takes the form of water - something which does not exist in an environment when the viewer might need it most.
The mirage can not be obtained, it can not offer sustenance in the form of water, and it can not be touched. I wonder if I can link this ancient phenomenon to something ubiquitous in our current time frame. I’ve been working to form a connection between the mirage and concepts of “the virtual”. Both are immaterial, unknowable, and beyond our ability to touch. This ingoing body of work will engage heavily with optics as both a visual means to perceive the world and a self-reflexive device of how we’ve grown to live more in "screen space".
This ongoing body of work unfolds through several different projects including a performative gesture in which 150 people met for 1 hour to make a mirage using reflective panels, research on cloaking and mirages with the Nanotech Institute at UT Dallas , and a series of sculptural installations excavating and fragmenting land with its own reflection.
