I amass exhaustive collections of screen shots drawn from Instagram posts that provide the reservoir of source material for each Repost work. I appropriate these shared images without alteration, deploying them as the thematic and color “palette” of these mosaic works – as the actual and conceptual material carrying the persistent indexicality of the collective act of showing and sharing our images on online platforms. By directly appropriating the “poor images” held within their online platform’s social network, I take them out of circulation, twisting their commodification and overlaying with my own order and reading. Many of the works in Repost play with the language of hashtags and online searches – giving form and objecthood to the visual and textual tropes that fill the social ether. I work within the space where our image environment flattens source and derivation into nothing more than a vast shared gesture that can be unexpectedly embodied and subjectively transformed.
