The Passenger

The Passenger is a two-channel HD video installation that was exhibited in 2019 at the FINA Gallery at UBC Okanagan, the Vernon Public Art Gallery and the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver. The film runs 12 minutes 33 seconds and is projected onto two adjacent walls that meet in a corner, each projection 9 by 16 feet, with a low bench in front for viewers. The two channels run in sync with a single surround-sound audio track. It was shot with a combination of high-definition cameras and point-of-view cameras, and mixes in archival footage and degraded CRT television footage. The footage moves between night drives, tunnels, stairwells and a phone held in hand.

Artist Statement:
Digital machines offer us new ways to connect to others, manage relationships to people and things, and capture memories; but this digitalization of life also produces an isolation and a disassociation from the very reality it (re)produces. Intertwining aspects of surveillance, neoliberal individualism, isolation, and memory, I offer a candid and personal investigation of psychological and emotional being within our hyper-networked digital society. 

My work addresses the way that digital machines, data systems, and information space have become banal and taken-for-granted. Highlighting the digital systems that both passively and actively guide our movements, activities, and interactions, I explore the relationship and influence that these systems have in our daily lives. I see these relationships existing simultaneously in the real and digital realms. As the distinction between these two realms is increasingly fluid and blurry, my work aims to traverse the uncanny space between the digital and the real. 

I navigate this territory with a haunting exploration of the isolation and anxiety produced within this digital realm. Occupying an incorporeal territory of contemporary life, my work probes the potential effects of a type of automated society that injects neoliberal modes of production into us, and conditions us to perform more like algorithmic machines and less like emotional human beings. 

The Passenger was exhibited at the Polygon Gallery as part of the Lind Prize, the Vernon Public Art Gallery as part of Emergence, and solo in the FINA Gallery at UBCO.