ROB BIRCH

Representation doesn't describe identity.

It constructs it through inherited frameworks that have long determined whose image counts, and how. My work begins with this premise. Using the open grammar of collage and the potential of the digital, I build portraits that operate outside those inherited conventions, not by rejecting the portrait form, but by pushing it past the point where representation can hold. The result is images that function less as likenesses and more as encounters: with 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.