Say Yes

Inspired by the persuasions of mass media and consumer culture, Say Yes is a meditation on visual seduction that considers how the aesthetics of visual advertising underlie and influence contemporary life, notions of self, and our connections to others.

I am an American artist, photographer, and director based in Milan, Italy.

My body of work, Say Yes, uses photography to construct a visually melodic and lyrical examination of consumerist dreams, the power of persuasion, self-image, and origins of desire. The images in this body of work both explore and mimic the slick visual rhetoric of commercial photography to consider how the aesthetics of visual advertising underlie and influence all aspects of contemporary life including our relationships to, and understandings of self and others.

In an era marked by both hyper-connectivity and hyper-isolation, Say Yes is a sharp examination of the culture of commerce we inhabit. The series serves as a mirror to our smoothed-over, technologically-driven psyche, blurring the lines between individual identity and consumerism. Weaving a tapestry of fragmented narratives and folding commercialism inward by adopting the sleek rhetorics of visual advertising photography, my pictures question how ego and identity are shaped by commerce and desire. How much of our desires are truly ours? How entangled are we with the economy of things? Who are we in a complex world governed by consumerism? Is personal connection and desire ever not mediated by the soft power influence of commerce?

The works in this series often take form as sculptural prints that evoke the machine-made and mass-produced, and follow my interest in both subverting and embracing the languages of commercial, fashion, and product photography. Oftentimes blurring the lines between art, design, and commerce, these works consider the intersections of consumerism and ego, and the connections between longing, selfhood, influence, and purchasing power.

Breaking away from conventional photographic prints, Say Yes often employs physical cutouts that puncture the picture surfaces to disrupt the authority of individual images and their influence on the viewer. The cutouts, often taking the shape of recognizable graphics, reveal underlying and mostly obscured images and color gradients. This unique integration of layered images and cut-out graphics creates an often sculptural and visually charged aesthetic system that draws from autobiographical, fictional, and tongue-in-cheek appropriations of seductive commercial aesthetics. A tennis racket, a cold beer, a soft cat, an inflatable flamingo, a fresh pair of sneakers, a fast motorcycle – these isolated fragments form part of a larger, disjointed whole. The pictures themselves becomes proxies for the warped personal memories, influences, desires, and false promises that inspired them, each simmering with allusions to comfort, pleasure, prestige, and escape.