黑料不打烊

This body of work cites and recycles images, objects, and information culled from a wide range of cultural and personal sources, including neuroscience and the broader medical field, the widespread proliferation of photographs of abandoned psychiatric facilities, historical documentation, and firsthand accounts of the experience of schizophrenia. Such images and objects have come to stand for, and in some instances have risen to the level of, iconic representation. In a positive way these various cultural artifacts can be interpreted as giving material form to what would otherwise remain an abstract checklist of symptoms, but conversely they may also be criticized as merely replaying unexamined beliefs regarding mental illness. Thus, in developing this project, the following questions repeatedly surfaced. First off, 鈥淗ow might such images unwittingly reinforce narratives of mental illness as a psychotic phantasmagoria of otherworldly radical difference?鈥� Secondly, 鈥淚s it possible to produce images that do not collapse into tired cultural tropes?鈥� And finally, 鈥淚n direct contrast to the official indexing functionality of many of the source images, is there any sort of counter-narrative resistance arising from what can best be described as aesthetic excess?鈥�