Fúji's Flowers: Volume II

Fall 2026

Fúji’s Flowers: Volume II begins with a question I asked myself six years ago.

In 2020, during a period of uncertainty and self-examination, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and wrote in lipstick: “Who the Fuck Is FujifilmGirl?” The phrase, an homage to Alexander David Turner and Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys?, became both a provocation and a genuine question about the identity I had constructed around myself as an artist. I photographed the mirror with my Polaroid camera, then placed the images in a box, where they remained unseen.

In 2026, I returned to them.

Rather than treating the photographs as relics, I wanted to give them another life and to allow the person I was then to enter into conversation with the artist I am now. The series became an exercise in memory, transformation, and the strange distance that develops between ourselves and our former selves. Each Polaroid is mounted onto college-ruled paper and framed with pieces of gaffer tape I have collected throughout my years working as a commercial photographer. These ordinary materials carry their own histories too. To me, the paper evokes childhood, handwriting, learning, and even home, while the tape belongs to sets, studios, equipment cases, and the invisible labor behind making photographs. Across the pages, I introduce color with oil pastels, gestures, symbols, fragments of language, and recurring marks drawn from my own visual vocabulary. They are instinctive and some may say imperfect - part annotation, part interruption, part evidence of the present reaching back toward the past.

And within each piece, a black flower appears.

Volume II is less interested in answering the question “Who the Fuck Is FujifilmGirl?” but rather in preserving the act of asking it. The work exists somewhere between photograph, diary page, archive, and self-portrait. It is a record of an identity that was never fixed, but continues to be rewritten.

Fúji's Flowers: Volume I

Summer 2026

This series began as photographs I created in 2023 and were reimagined during the summer of 2026. Rather than treating the original images as finished pieces, I returned to them with the idea to continue the conversation they had started years earlier in photographer Lissette Schaeffler's class. By layering oil based accents and hand painted acrylic black flowers onto each photograph, I sought to blur the boundary between photography and painting. The added elements are not arbitrary: they are extensions of the images themselves by allowing the photographs to evolve beyond the moment they were captured.

Volume I is simply an exploration of memory, transformation, and growth.