Travel Tag (2016) is an animated video drawn from work I created over a number of years started in 2009. Utilizing parts of my installation, Traveling without doing Harm, exhibited at Elephant Space in 2014, this work comments upon traveling as a source of “inspiration.” Addressing issues of cultural insensitivity and voyeurism while thinking about the imagery of travel postcards, I created an installation of small watercolor paintings. These were placed opposite a moving mirror, creating an installation of paintings and objects that voyeuristically contemplate beauty and change.
Travel Tag reconsiders these images as a silent animation with its pacing loosely based on Boléro, the one-movement orchestral piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel. The images shown are watercolor paintings of tourist photos while the other half is documentation of the City of Alexandria, Egypt, during and after the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. While moving through different locations and times zones, a travel tag on a suitcase is a mark of ownership. If the suitcase is lost, hopefully it will be returned to the address written on the tag.
My work examines ideas of visibility, accessibility, and the questioning of subjectivity to interpret everyday events. Often times using my personal experience in cultural clashes, I create work in various mediums: an English and Spanish idiom-laced weather animation, a series of watercolor paintings depicting tourism and trauma in Egypt, or contemplating the ideal space to be dreaming when real-estate is an issue. What unites my use of these mediums is questioning a viewer’s expectations.
