My work expresses my feelings about self identity and allows me to be more comfortable in my own skin. From adolescence into young adulthood, I struggled with balancing obsession and mental stability, so I created a timeline of my experiences combined with material objects I kept close to me during that period of my life. This series is a shrine and dedication to both the celebrities I loved and the different people I have been in the past. Despite my difficulties being forward and outgoing, these photographs are large and unavoidable. Every detail, every insecurity about who I am and who I used to be, and every imperfection is blown up in scale in a way that is both confident and vulnerable.

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I work with self-portrait photography because it helps me form a better relationship with myself. For the process of this work, I chose a photoshoot of a celebrity that I had an obsession with for a prolonged period during my teenhood to early adulthood. I then recreated the photograph with my own personal narrative attached to it. In each piece, I left a small blank space to edit the original image of the celebrity back into my composition to show where my pose and expression came from.

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The theme I am talking about in this series is “fan culture” and what it means to be an obsessive fan. There is an entire community of fandoms and fanpeople, me having been in many different fandoms and still considering myself to be in a handful today. It deserves to be brought to light and discussed. I think fan culture should be normalized and should be brought forward in a fine arts environment.