Artist's Statement

Utilizing a tableau of pop culture, my artwork is a stage that allows me to decipher individuality and the influence of the collective experience. More specifically, the work explores the disjunction between expectations and reality for women in early adulthood.

As Umberto Eco describes in Travels in Hyperreality, “visuals (cinema, videotape, mural, comic strip photograph) are apart of our memory” and the “experience (love, fear, or hope) is already filtered through ‘already seen’ images.” It would be hard for me not to acknowledge this within my own memories and personal expectations; everything I have experienced has been reinforced by the Western version. The extended reality of media, legends and social standards become instruments that create the symphony of discovering self, which makes it hard to distinguish what is authentic and what is simulated.

My process it to use myself, my own encounters and the ideas I have of human understanding to define the thin line where the collective cultural expectations are impossible to separate from the self. I approach my medium, photography and video, in a fashion that recognizes the staged presence. Self- portraiture allows me to show the awareness of the camera and how in turn it constructs a relationship of creating identity.

-Sarah Knobel

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School Portraits (2008)

Posing in front of the lens… I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image – my image- will be generated: will I be born from an antipathetic individual or from a ‘good sort’? If only I could ‘come out’ on paper as on a classical canvas, endowed with a noble expression – thoughtful, intelligent, etc.! …I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from my effigy. What I want, in short, is that my image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) ‘self’; but it is the contrary that must be said: ‘myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is t he image which is heavy, motionless and stubborn (which why society sustains it).
- Excerpts from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Having recently experienced being a school portrait photographer, I have realized that school portraits are the heart of Roland Barthes words.

The issue is the awareness of posing and the knowledge that the image will define “the self”. Some sitters come with expressions prepared, while other unsure sitters’ expressions are constantly shifting. Regardless the image, one moment in time has superficial defined who we are, at least for one year.

With a witty and light-hearted approach, my observations led me to do a series of self-portraits.
Because of its familiarity, this series triggers an automatic response to the relationship of the camera
and sitter, but also examines how an image can define perception of the self.

During the process of shooting, attention was paid to the way I was dressed but most importantly the expression and interaction between me and the camera. My dress and expressions were influenced by what I observed of my previous sitters.

Ultimately the images become mimicry of the real. The fact the images are staged and I am both sitter and photographer allows the work to be interpreted as signs of cultural coding and social structure, and our awareness of how our own identities are constructed.

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The Yellow Wallpaper (2008)

When published in 1890, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” epitomized a sense of restriction and limited expectations felt by many women of the time. Afflicted by anxiety and depression, the central protagonist is prescribed a “rest cure” which forbids her to work or follow intellectual pursuit. A solution chosen for her by her husband and physician, the “rest cure” drives the young woman further into madness and hallucination as she fixates on the garish pattern of the wallpaper that forms her cage.

In reflection of this historical writing, I use photography and video to explore the disjunction between expectations and reality for women in early adulthood. I employ the styles and symbols of popular media culture to address the conflicted state of modern living, the new yellow wallpaper. To me, this is a natural aesthetic to express the anxieties experienced by many women on an emotional and intellectual level as attempts are made to unite one's anticipations of relationships, belief systems, surroundings, and identity with the reality of life.

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My Future is Near (2009)

If the 'real' has come to seem 'unreal', it is natural to turn the 'unreal' as real... however is due to man's need to impose significance on the empirical reality around him, which in itself is without
significance.
- Excerpts from Christine Brooke Rose’s The Rhetoric of the Unreal

My Future is Near is a new photo and video project (work in progress) that makes use of a technical
process where what is imagined and desired can visually become defined. Using photographs, and
magazines within a virtual space; I create a private urban haven where I reside peacefully among
designer furniture and adorned by my beastly friends.

The titles, such as Oprah and Backyard Birding and Elle’s Decoration Issue, Googled Clouds with Backyard Birding, give homage to the images scanned and downloaded sources that become the main elements in creating the space. These scanned sections of magazines and downloaded images give reference to the unpractical, unobtainable and desired.

At first glance the work is falsely sweet, once the images are fully examined it is realized that my
character is incapable of living in reality, but is also sadly alone. Although the work is currently in
progress, it is my goal to demonstrate the conditions of modern society and the distorted perceptions that make it hard to distinguish the real from the unreal.

In a world where Second Life becomes apart of one’s reality and magazines define the norm, I want my work to define the contemporary structure of space and technology. Specifically, how it can create an ideal, but ultimately create separation and isolation.