media/storm

Following Hurricane Helene's devastation of my hometown in Western North Carolina, I documented the collision between lived experience and its media representation.

The installation juxtaposes personal videos posted by affected residents with 142 related news articles from local, national, and international outlets. The videos foreground lived experience and material conditions—damage, exhaustion, waiting—while the articles present a dense and conflicting field of explanations, claims, and political narratives surrounding the same event.

Rather than synthesizing or resolving these contradictions, media/storm stages their coexistence and deliberately withholds analytical closure. Viewers experience the difficulty of orienting themselves within an information environment where urgency, volume, and ideological framing overwhelm the capacity for verification. The work asks how sense-making becomes a form of labor, with an elaborate media apparatus producing confusion rather than clarity, where maximum information results in minimal understanding.

Part of 90 Seconds to Midnight, group exhibition

Part of Vienna Art Week 2024
Organized by VCAS - Vienna Contemporary Art Space
November. 9th-15th, 2024

Video (42 min loop) and printed news articles, 2024