The Unreal and the Ephemeral
This body of work was created in Toronto, during a time marked by profound isolation and emotional disconnection. In the absence of daily human interaction, even my sense of existing within reality began to fade. These collages were born from a yearning for others—a reaching out through imagined faces and forms, an attempt to materialize connection where none could be found.
The human silhouettes featured in this series were generated using AI. Although I approach such technologies with hesitation—particularly in the context of artistic expression—it was, paradoxically, through these anonymous, mass-produced images that I felt the closest to the human figure at that time.
By layering fragile images and fragments of actual photographs onto these synthetic forms, I sought to bridge the divide between memory and imagination, the real and the unreal. The process became a quiet confrontation with the sense of my own existence dissolving into the generic contours of algorithmically generated bodies.
This work is not a celebration of AI. On the contrary, it emerges from a deep ambivalence. Confronting the neutral, depersonalized aesthetic of machine-generated imagery made me more acutely aware of the loss of individuality, and of the aching absence of real human presence. The only visible human figures I could grasp were digital ones—and within that lies a quiet grief.
This series is both a record and a prayer: an exploration of the tension between the longing to exist, and the urge to retreat into unreality when reality fails to hold us.
