In many aspects of society we have become just a number, to the telephone company we are recognized as an account number and to the United States government individuals are a social security number. Institutions are driven to numbering us purely for efficiency and financial reasons, which lead me to think about the way society revolves around money, in the literal sense, being the heart of society. Following this train of thought, I made sculptural reliefs out of shredded documents such as pay stubs, bank statements, and credit card applications. I shredded these personal documents in an attempt to both protect and destroy the identity forced upon me by corporations, institutions and society. The reliefs are a voyeuristic insight to the shifting landscapes of my identity and contain fragments of information not normally made public.
As a society, we try to ease our existence with technical advances but in the end these advances can make life more complex by further pushing the walls of separation between the individual and the mechanisms of society. I continue to reflect on how each person is being reduced to a mere number by corporations and institutions; we have lost our sense of individuality. Like the personal documents I shredded in my work, within society our identity has become shredded.