Soon after moving to the city of Vallejo in California in 2016, I began by plying the streets of my neighborhood with a camera and connecting with strangers through picture taking conversations. Around the same time, I was invited to join a web site called NextDoor, which promises to connect users with neighbors. In the Crime and Safety section, I encountered numerous warnings about ‘suspicious’ people lurking on the streets. Pixelated surveillance images were often linked to the posts, which described details such as the length of a woman’s skirt, the style of a person’s stride, the color of a person’s skin. The posts seemed to provide a reason for people feel afraid – afraid of the unknown other, afraid of the perceived dangers of the street.
My new work involves collecting, cropping, printing, cutting, and stitching together visuals from Nextdoor. I am turning the supposedly dangerous materials into quilts – objects we normally think of as safe and intimate. The quilts are my response to a divide within my community that, as a photographer, I live on both sides of. I am trying to interfere with the truth that this surveillance lays claim to, and to consider the role that technology plays in how the world around us is understood.
I have returned to the street often without my camera to collect scraps of fabric – towels, a baby car seat cover, a pair of jeans, a tent. By combining fabric found on the street with virtually captured surveillance, I play with bringing two worlds together.