Seana Leah

The Sky is Falling 83-4

My work primarily revolves around themes of environmental concerns or time. These themes inspire me as they represent an objective external world or principle surrounding each of us. Yet, there is a relationship, a connection, that each individual has with environment and time that is entirely subjective. I find that these relationships are often overlooked until something out of the ordinary or landmark occurs, such as an historic storm in the environment or a birth or death in the case of time.

The interconnectedness of ourselves and the things external to ourselves is vitally important to how we perceive and act out our lives. It isn’t easy, even for me, to recognize the impact these themes have on my daily life and the effect that I have them. In my work, I seek to understand the functions of environment and time and our place and part in them.

Mediums of indexicality, the phenomenon of a sign pointing to (or indexing) some object in the context it occurs, are important in this understanding. For example, photography is one medium that indexes light, which is an actual measurement of time, and the environment that it captures representationally.

The Sky is Falling 83-4 is a photographic project in which I tackled environmental themes. Utilizing the narrative of “the sky is falling” to illustrate the threat of climate change, I took a digital photograph of sky and intervened with a human and technical hand to subvert nature within the image.

I used databending, changing the image’s code with text editing, to insert a quotation from a psychologist about climate change into the image, creating man-made coded artifacts and glitches. By coding I disrupted images without immediately seeing alterations, much like how our actions can create imperceptible, accumulated changes in the environment. I further distorted the images through photoshop, inserting more human interference and alterations.