artist statement

JENNIFER BUCHEIT

Again & Again: A Reflection on Consumer Culture

Humans are creatures of habit—we eat, we drink, we work, we play, we sleep, we wake up the next day—and do it all again. Along the way we invent and manufacture an abundance of products for purchase and consumption, generating remarkable amounts of waste as we attempt to make our daily living as convenient as possible. 

Agan & Again: A Reflection on Consumer Culture is a fine art photographic series that presses the pause button on our incessant cycles of contemporary consumption. Due to paper’s ingrained associations with the photographic medium, it is used as a case study for the project: after use, but before hitting the landfill, paper packaging is collected, deconstructed, and photographed in a still life setting. These images are digitally composited and then printed directly back onto the interior side of the original packaging itself. 

The repurposed paper waste provides a moment of visual clarity, presenting material evidence of habitual consumer behavior intertwined with the human condition. Photographic language of formal abstraction, layering and repetitive compositional elements, reinforce the manufactured nature of the subject matter, while random textures, torn edges and smeared inks, evoke reminders of paper’s organic origins. 

Both aesthetically engaging and socially revealing, this series challenges conventional ideas of what objects we consider art, and what objects we consider expendable; offering the viewer an opportunity to reflect on the environmental consequences of our present-day consumption, while simultaneously retaining hope in the extraordinary capacity of human ingenuity.