As some of my longtime followers know, I’ve had a complicated relationship with social media. In 2019 I was experiencing so much anxiety that I permanently deleted all of my accounts (60,000 followers over 3 platforms) with no plans to return. I spent the next year off the grid. Though I’d already been in therapy for years I also began going to a support group for adult survivors of childhood abuse (ASCA). I started climbing and began regularly cycling again. The combination of processing trauma, moving my body, and removing myself from situations and relationships that exacerbated my anxieties, I began to heal.

During that year I noticed that I changed not only my methods of art making but also what I expected would come from one of my creations (which was ultimately tied to my needs for acceptance and to survive). Before I left social media it felt as though a piece of art that I shared wasn’t a success until it had been validated through likes or comments or follows or gigs. Chasing a target as elusive and hard to quantify as this meant that I most frequently internalized the perceived failures and doubled down on my efforts (do better, do more, never stop) until I reached my limit and I hit a wall.
Though it seems that we are moving into an age where everyone is their own brand, I needed to hear the message that I had inherent worth apart from what I created or could monetize. I changed my daily rhythm and general posture towards my time on this earth. As I approached my one-year anniversary of having left social media, I considered what it could look like to return to it. My therapist gave me helpful advice of implementing a daily time limit for the apps and also limiting myself to two posts per week. I took it a step further and decided to “un-curate” my posts, interspersing more personal posts alongside my professional work, in an effort of not taking social media too seriously.
All this to say that when Unsplash approached me to create a body of work around the negative side of social media, I was able to pull from my personal experience when thinking up which concepts and techniques to use. I made multiple exposures to illustrate how I struggle to not have a phone in my hand. I used a projector in conjunction with a long exposure motion to reference both body heat maps as well as the frenetic pace at which life moves, especially when viewed on a screen. Finally, my favorite idea was to project images of beautiful landscapes (images I’d shot with my phone on various vacations) behind the subject, with their back turned to the natural beauty and their face lit only by their phones (one more thing I pulled from my personal experience).

A big thank-you to the team at Unsplash+ for the opportunity to create a series of work around something so personal and important to me. Also, thank you to Ryan, Jeego, Shelby, Priscilla, and my kids, Jack and Margo, for being such great models.