ROB BIRCH

Representation doesn't describe identity.

It is an ordered power matrix that constructs representation through various inherited frameworks that have long determined whose image counts, and how. My work begins with that paradox. By using the open grammar of collage and the potential of digital collage, I build portraits that operate outside inherited conventions that have endured for generations, not by rejecting the portrait form, but by pushing it past the point where representation can no longer hold. The results are images that function less as likenesses and more as encounters: informed by the layered, contested, and often invisible forces that shape how we see ourselves and each other.

This is work about perception before ideology gets to it. About what a portrait might be if we stripped away what we've been taught a person looks like.