The piece, Body Double, explored the possibility of creating a sensation of incoherence through an overabundance of conflicting information. The piece consisted of 365 copies of my birth certificate, each of which were individually falsified with the adjustment of some significant or insignificant details: alternate names my parents may have considered, the insertion of a step-parent in the place of a biological one, an alternate home address, alternate birthing attendant, and so forth. Displayed in a wall-to-wall grid, the potential realities are expansive and seemingly endless. The single ‘true’ birth certificate among them is neither removed nor erased, but rendered meaningless.

The piece points to records and paper trails as supposed confirmations of stable identities and proposed that these, too, have a fragile role in the support of coherent public identities. It references long histories of falsified or erased documentation as a tool of social manipulation across the globe and it protests the cold and unyielding summary a person into the form of documents. Additionally, the piece is an act of nostalgia—visualizing the disorienting consequences of engaging the proposition, “what if…?”

This piece was installed as part of the Solo Exhibition, “Dissonate,” at FrontierSpace Gallery in Missoula in 2015.