The work Dissociated series explores the feeling of estrangement, the unbelonging of the world around us, and the separation from our surroundings that we are supposedly integrated with. Dissociated series represents fragments of places, people, and feelings in our memories, dreams, and realities that make us whole as humans.
Claire’s main medium is photographic materials. In this series, Claire experiments with 35mm negative film cutouts of found photographs from the photo lab she worked for before the pandemic. In contrast to the common behavior of treating film negatives as a sacral object: the use of gloves when treating negatives to prevent dust, scratches, and fingerprints that would ‘flaw’ the images, Claire intentionally cut them violently and re-ordered the negatives with bare hands.
The choice to use found photographs speak to the anonymity and disconnection aspects of the work. The found photographs used for this work were recovered from discarded negatives Claire’s old workplace was going to throw out. The original image takers chose not to keep the original tangible negatives after they got the digitized version of their analog images. The found negatives are now abandoned memories created by anonymous people. Found photographs create the distance between the artist and the work, and also between the viewer and the work. It represents feelings of alienation and disconnection with our surroundings after the years of pandemic. Social creatures like us were forced by the situation to alienate ourselves from each other.
The square-like shapes of the cutouts symbolize digital images in this modern day and age. The thousands of images on our phone’s camera roll are arranged together to shape a rigid square grid. The default arrangements of digital images on our desktops are squares. On the work itself, the more organic approach to the seemingly square shapes represents the human touch in our digital world. There are so many digital photographs we take on our phones that we end up forgetting and losing them in the archive. Today’s instantaneous access to photographs often depreciates the memories we made and documented.
The process of art making of this particular work is a one-way process; Claire might have a general idea of the contents of the found photographs, but after cutting them into little pieces of 2-3 mm cutouts, she has no idea which part of the photographs she is putting down on the scanner to create the work. Once the work is done and scanned, there is no going back and swapping a few cutouts. It is a process with uncertainties, referencing the analog photography process of taking pictures in the old days. Analog photographers would have to finish the whole roll of film before developing and scanning them. There is no way to know if the image taken is according to what the creator wants or not.
As human beings, oftentimes we feel like we are supposed to fit in a box, whether it’s our environment, jobs, social circles, or even our personality traits. We feel like we are disconnected from our sense of identity. Through the feeling of disconnection, we constantly explore the sense of belongingness throughout our lives. Where are we supposed to be? What should we do in our lives to be content? Humans are not made out of only who we are at the moment, all the fragments of individual memories, dreams, and realities make us whole as humans.
Dissociated uses references to the history of photography to explore the feelings of estrangement with our surroundings.