Afterimages
2025 - Ongoing
This body of work examines the psychological tendency to romanticize what has already receded—the past, the elsewhere, the unattainable— a condition closely tied to photography’s capacity to mediate time from the position of the present. The impulse toward idealization often emerges from a shared unease with contemporary life, shaped by the acceleration, repetition, and muted textures of the everyday. Nostalgia, in this sense, becomes less a private sentiment than a collective mode of perception: a way of inhabiting the present while imagining alternatives to it.
By projecting photographs that evoke a comforting elsewhere onto the surfaces of my current living space and daily routine, I create transient images that disrupt the stability of both memory and present environment. In this layered process, the project considers how photography shapes what we remember and how we long through fixing lived experience into flattened, aestheticized imprints that invite idealization. Rather than attempting to restore the past, the work treats nostalgia as a critical space of tension, where memory, desire, and imagination intersect, revealing both the comfort and the restlessness embedded in our collective relationship to images and time.