Much of my current practice revolves around how we change the way we present ourselves to signal belonging, or the desire to belong, to a certain group. In Profile, I play with the wish to belong to the group of “desirable romantic partner” considering the innate performativity involved in the way we present ourselves in online dating photos and the deliberate curation of self. The work is a series of matched pairs of old dating photographs and a reaction photo, presented as jigsaw puzzles which are intended to be handled and reconfigured by viewers, overcoming the limits of a single static image in presenting a dynamic multitude of selves, illustrating on the one hand how our self changes over time, and on the other, how different viewers put together the pieces of information they have about us in different ways to form their own pictures of us.
A short animation, titled "Bathrobe" shows possible combinations of one of the jigsaw pairs:
The jigsaws are intended to by exhibited in such a way that they can be handled by viewers. Below you can find a short video showing the jigsaws being handled.
As an adjunct to the project, I have also produced the first of a two-part video installation, titled “Profile: A Serial Picture Analysis” which uses many of the around 2000 images from my archive with a critical narration drawn from research by Johanna Degen and Lisa Kleeberg-Niepage systemising the different types of images used in online dating profiles. This video can be found below.