The subconscious mind is the most pure form of reaction that you can get from another human. The simple twitch of their lips or roll of their eyes can signify more than words could. Behavioural glitches like these are hard to hide when someone doesn’t recognize they are being done. For my final body of work, I wanted to continue a series I created last year that focused on the ephemerality of expressions. Last year, I took two subjects who were best friends, but I only knew one of them. They came into my studio and were asked a series of uncomfortably personal questions. My camera captured their immediate response of vulnerability, insecurity, or anxiety.

A year later, I had the same two people return to my studio where they were asked the same series of questions. I repeated the same process as last time, but this year the results were slightly different with one of the two subjects. The boy my friend had brought with her last year was only a mere acquaintance, but today he’s my boyfriend. Now that I had known him personally, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the project to see how his reactions would stay the same or change. The ephemerality of relationships and trust was now a new aspect that I could add into this project.

In order to understand how to capture these fleeting moments, I referenced a variety of artists and their works. Sophie Calle’s work, The Blind, Gillian Wearing’s, Signs, and Shizuka Yokomizzo’s, Stranger inspired me. I also referenced various social experiments that helped me create my series of questions. I also researched questions most likely to make people uncomfortable and personal questions a therapist would ask.