The landscape of popular culture is in constant flux. Trends and viral moments are blips in the algorithm that provide us entertainment before vanishing. Step on Me is focused on both short-term bursts of interest and long-term movements in the perception of sexuality, gender, and race. Through investigating the possibility of divorcing queer iconography and traditional gender dynamics from their contexts, the focus shifts to predicting the future. There is no way to know whether society will be more or less conservative in 30 years, but it is certain that sexuality, gender, and race will be perceived differently. How exactly it will change is not the primary concern. The current moment is what must be documented.

At all times, something surreal is happening. An individual or a group of friends is engaging in an activity that appears odd. If you saw such a scene, you might double-take, stare, and gossip about it with your friends, but eventually it would dissolve from memory. These photographs are an archive of such instances; instances composed around a product. The product is not always clear, but something is always for sale. Conceptualized as advertisements and executed as performances, each image in Step on Me is a trace of a hyper-contemporary America where reality is slightly inflated.

To subvert the canonized expectation of what an advertisement looks like, the images in this series are not concerned with maintaining a direct relationship with the objects being marketed. There is also a focus on advertising products that typically do not receive traditional visual marketing such as raw meat, decorative spikes, and floss. The compositional and thematic variety evokes the experience of scrolling through a social media feed: being overwhelmed with imagery that, despite the effort involved in its production, will quickly be forgotten.

The physical outcome of each digital image is a large-scale print that harkens to window advertisements at a shopping mall. Each framed photograph is printed in multiple sections and sewn together, while the rugs are embedded with images through a solar-printing process. These physical workflows exponentially increase the presence of the human hand and prevent mechanical reproduction. Beyond references to contemporary pop culture and art historical painting, the project shares bones with Robert Frank’s The Americans, cataloguing instances of suburban banality, though the stages in Step on Me are more forward facing. Treading the line between mockery and appreciation, the photographs argue amongst themselves, bickering over their levels of authenticity and whether being authentic matters at all.

In Exhibition

Step On Me was shown as a solo exhibition in Gallery #003 at the School of Art + Design as my undergraduate thesis show. The exhibition ran from May 1st through May 12th, 2024.