“My generation views screens as a reality, a reality that we can control and perfect. I started with this when I was about yay high, got up one Sunday morning and borrowed my sister’s computer. I knew I had about an hour before she would wake up from a state of dreaming and start to complain about the noise from the machine. She hissed and spat and I would run like a scared cat back to my alley.
My first computer was my sister’s old one, it was a beige PC battle station with a CRT monitor, floppy disk and CD-ROM. The baddest shiz nit from the mid-90s. My favourite floppy was a cat programmed to walk in four beats across the screen, and sometimes it sat on the trash bin. To have lived, to remember, a moving, trompe-loeil in cat form!
My process involves both digital and analogue photography, and pre-cinematic illusionary toys. Tools are plentiful, but with an alter ego I can play with the disease that is called “perfection”. Do I pose for the camera or am I posed by it? Does Sherman pose or act, or act as if posing? Like hair I get tangled up, needing to cut my bangs shorter for each time I lose myself.
The image of night and day feels familiar. My reference L’Empire de la Lumière is not just an influence, it’s a metaphor for my entire theme. This image juxtaposed the natural and the artificial light, a daylit sky with nighttime, it’s almost as if we have two clocks running at the same time. In Magritte’s contradiction I recognise the way photography promises truth while manufacturing myth. Here she declares herself the Empress of Light, suspended in a day that refuses to end.”
Dagny Hay
Revenge [.gif] [.pdf]
Daylights [.pdf] [.jpg]
Edited on my smartphone series [.pdf]
Empire of Light
Døgnrytmen [.jpg] [.pdf]