Michelle Shen

Environmental Studies major, Studio Art minor

When I started to take photographs on my Canon AE1 film camera in high school, it opened my eyes to communities within Dallas-- a space that felt so familiar and almost monotonous at times-- that I never would have known existed. Photography became a tool not only for seeing things from a different perspective, but also as a way of being in the world around me. In Susan Sontag's On Photography, she wrote, "to collect photographs is to collect the world." This statement is one driving force behind how I view the art and process of taking pictures-- as a means of capturing the world around us in different small amounts. I am motivated by curiosity and the ambition to investigate different modes of photography in order to delve deeper into my interests at the intersection of documentary-style photography and climate change.

Mending

Polaroids, archival inkjet prints, silver gelatin chemograms

Jewett Gallery

This body of work focuses around four key themes: immigration, responsibility, identity, and uncertainty. These words stem from self-reflection on my own Chinese American identity, exploring not only my own past, but also that of my family, in order to better understand my present. It wasn't until college that I fully realized that my parents had a life before me, which included immigrating and attempting to assimilate into a new culture while also dealing with a complicated marriage. I explore these concepts by cutting into and rearranging archival family pictures in order to hide, conceal, and project certain relationships based on my four themes. An important display of projection is channeled through the use of intentional blank spaces. The blank spaces are meant to insinuate a sense of uncertainty, and to question what makes one's identity.

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