Statement
This series of four books is a reflection on and accumulation of my high school semester abroad in Israel. My semester, represented by redacted snapshots from Facebook and journals, is juxtaposed with recent written reflections on my memories and photographs pulled from the Google search: “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” It took my six years of artwork, research, writing, and education to critically revisit this four month trip in which I was both a part of the religious and ethnic majority, and yet also a clueless and willfully ignorant tourist. Components of 2010 engage with questions of what it means to be a visitor in an area of conflict, media consumption (as most images from the Google search were from news sources), personal embarrassment and guilt, what it means to be a part of the majority, and more.
These concepts are explored in two different iterations. The first is a series of four books that combine photos from Facebook, in which I’ve cut myself from the image, redacted journal entries both from the experience and my current reflection, as well as a juxtaposition with photographs pulled from the Google search: “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The second consists of large printed Facebook snapshots from abroad, in which I hand cut myself out and projected the Google searched photographs over. The final product is photographic documentation, which collapses the space and further confuses how the combined images are made.
Sophia Keskey 