Description
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Shortlisted Artist
Jason Hendardy [1987] is an artist based in Seattle, Washington, whose mixed-media practice engages with the intersections of images, identity, and institutional power. His work explores how contemporary systems shape our lives, addressing issues of assimilation, cultural fragmentation, and society’s imprint on the human experience. Through photography, installation, and book-making, Hendardy critiques how social structures influence our perceptions of self and society.
Artist Statement | Personal Technologies is an ongoing photographic investigation into how images and objects shape American identity in our mediated age. By weaving together self-portraits, assemblages, and a typology of everyday objects, I examine the quiet ways cultural influence accumulates in our daily lives and transforms how we understand ourselves. The project draws from media, news, and everyday experiences I consume and encounter. These influences resurface in various ways throughout my work. Sometimes they are recognizable and sometimes these influences are transformed through lived experience. What emerges is a portrait of contemporary American selfhood built not from singular moments of revelation, but from the gradual accumulation of symbolic objects: a pack of Marlboros, my father’s resident alien card, a bottle of Clorox bleach, each carrying personal and cultural weight that speaks to both consumption and belonging. My assemblages are constructed through a process of rephotographing a layering. I arrange objects with personal or cultural significance, photograph them, print the image large, then rephotograph it with new objects placed on top or in front of the print. This process repeats, building visual depth that mirrors how influences layer in our psyche. The resulting images reveal beliefs and assumptions I didn’t realize I’d internalized, making visible the typically invisible process of cultural absorption. The typology presents objects from my life as archaeological evidence of influence. These range from distinctly American consumer goods to Indonesian cultural artifacts that reflect my family’s immigrant experience. Each object speaks to what it means to construct an American identity from fragments of different cultural worlds. The self-portraits complete this investigation by examining how the camera itself participates in the technologies that shape us. Photography doesn’t simply document this process of influence; it becomes complicit in it, another medium through which we construct and understand ourselves. Personal Technologies addresses urgent questions about identity formation in our current moment: What images and objects do we hold onto, and what makes us keep them? How do we participate in constructing the identity we think we’re discovering?
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All print enquiries:
tom@opendoors.gallery
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