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Have you ever felt that you think a bit too quickly to write, yet too slowly to form speech?

This is where images come to work for me.

My Thesis work, From Pixel to Prose, is the most recent iteration of my ongoing practice of seeing which forms my photographs can take. In thinking of photography as one may any other language, I take into account its affordances as well as its limitations. The gaps that show through leave room for translation. As I translate my collected still life imagery, my ‘found still lives’, I also pay attention to the in-between states, the images’ transliterations, and what is lost and gained between forms. By playing between image forms, as AmiPalm Studio, I extend my practice of active looking and making art from the everyday, to one that invites others into my working collection, an expanding index, and its vocabularies.  

I have made space to share and guide the translations through my gallery space, in DCODE Gallery, which exists in both a digital and physical realm. Primarily located online as a hand-coded website, the space extends to Instagram as well as physical spaces through pop-up shows. Opened in March 2020, the inaugural show showcased my translated still lives as reformed 3D printed objects and the state between as fabric banners, referencing my views of digital images as a material of its own. From there, the space has continued to change and expand, including sharing of others’ works that interrogate image, text, and form. This growth, along with a pull to invite others more directly into the space inspired me to renew the gallery as a community space. 

From Pixel to Prose (FPTP), frames this expansion of the space in nodes – through the addition of a workshop series, and the pop-up show featuring a photo installation. This Spring programming is made in partnership with the artist-in-residence, AmiPalm Studio. The first node takes the form of ‘Encode’ a hanging photo installation, calls to the antholog – what you get when combining a photo log and poetry anthology. The installation involves the space it inhabits in its presence and shaping of light and perception. Projected images and text play and are in conversation as equals as they traverse physical space. This interaction of images and texts through the medium of light and flattened object, transforms the prints. The banners are now interfaces between light and space, allowing images to be re-activated as viewing screens. 

The second node, ‘Transcode’ is an inaugural workshop series. It allows access to the studio’s process of translating the images into poems, along with a toolkit to practice oneself. Placing emphasis on ‘reading within the frame’, this workshop series takes the installed show, ‘Encode’ as an example. Participants will learn how to pull keywords from within their images, and form their own translations as poems. They will be engaged as visitors and recast as members of a community, making conversations using their images – with their poetic translations as visual vocabulary. To those who consider themselves image makers, artists, those interested in language and translation, and those wanting to find their visual vocabulary, reframing ways we view the familiar can be a stepping stone to finding a new form of expression. This workshop series opens DCODE to being a space of greater collaboration and community.

DCODE presents its Spring programming, From Pixel to Prose (FPTP) via Encode and Transcode as machines of renewal – and welcomes your membership as impetus.

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