The billboard I created for For Freedoms is titled Personal Choice #3. Personal Choice #3 is a digital collage combining an "excerpted" archival image from the New York Public Library's Media Collection, and an original text that I wrote. This billboard is part of a larger series of works (Personal Choice) examining the relationship between images, captions, and how we use the combination of text and image to create or interpret history. I've recently been concerned with the very intimate and ongoing nature of daily life, and how that stands in contrast with the very exceptional moments that make it into historical narrative. I believe that linear time, and the idea of direct growth, is a form of myth-making; like any other myth, we rely on it to interpret a world that's too big to understand, but it also leaves a lot out, or simplifies complex situations in order to leave the reader with a moral. I'm interested in moving within the myth towards complexities that can be difficult to hold simultaneously, since I believe these complexities guide us more than we realize, and surface in surprising ways.

The Personal Choice series is part of my larger project Obligation to Others Holds Me in My Place, a study of intimacy at the scale of the immediate family.

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