believe me, 2017-

Believe me was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. The work references the familiar sight of a mobile phone's broken screen by overlaying the visual effect of cracks on a series of images that can be manipulated by the viewer and loaded successively by refreshing the browser. Using the seemingly damaged screen as a central metaphor, Believe me evokes the distortions that digital technologies impose on our experience of the world and each other. Failed or failing pixels change the colors, spaces, and meanings of the project's imagery which is politically charged in some cases, and in others captures the vernacular of the online environment through familiar interface elements or Internet folklore. The slightly glitched, broken, readable yet abstracted imagery of Believe me — the most often used two words by Donald Trump according to sociolinguistics Jennifer Sclafani's analysis for CNN — questions the status of reality as it is mediated through our screens in a fake news and post-truth environment.

 “Like a cracked screen, we often view the world via and by it for months or years before we ever bother to try to fix it. America is hard to see, and as an artist, I think you need this constant sense of being able to escape and vanish and feel. People always ask me where I consider home. Home, like America, is a complicated word. I have spent the last 5 years looking at America and trying to figure out how to renegotiate it: science is no longer considered fact, feelings have become politicized, colors have become politicized, everything has become a weapon. Even existing online—the private is public and the public is private and everything is political.”