The "View-Framing Devices" are highly crafted objects that are used as physical barriers between oneself and the outside world. The devices invite participants to explore and subvert the use of barrier in negotiating the private and internal self through a social and external world. When using the devices to present or obfuscate oneself in one's surroundings, how are the perceptions of self and others altered? How might social relationships develop as a result?
The human structures that most directly speak to barrier, or a "house" of self and body, are architecture and apparel. In the "View-Framing Devices," these design paradigms are manipulated with a phenomenological emphasis in devices that ask the participants to consider a particular point of being in the world, in relation to surroundings or others.
Because the devices are used to create resulting photographic images (portraiture, documentary, and landscape) the participants in the work are confronted with a playful reverse-voyeurism that is enormously conspicuous. The reverberating roles between watcher and watched invite participants, both inside the devices and out, to experiment with manifestations of looking, mask, persona, active viewership, and performance.
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