Today, every image in the world is available to us. Every image has also been seen. We have generated them all, through photography, film, CGI, and now AI. But images are not equal to the experiences that precede their generation. From our faulty memories to our casual family photographs to snaps of random moments on our phones, our drive to generate images is an attempt to recover a fullness of experience that cannot be relived. And so we generate and generate and generate, the images passing away as quickly as our experience, the former becoming a proxy for the latter.

Lightness of Being pushes against images getting us lost in their flow, not by seeking something behind the image, but by making images that are self-conscious of their own mediation. Every work is a product of vision, a view, a lens, a crop, a screen, then printing, reviewing, marking, reprinting, and framing. There is never just one image.

Through this meditation I turn a familiar image into something it’s not. Through this mediation, I’m trying to stay with the mystery of experience and my awe of the world. I want to make visible my very human capacity for joy, tears, and terror—and the viewer’s as well.