Bella Convertino is an American artist currently based in New Haven, CT, working with photography and video. She is an MFA candidate in Photography at the Yale School of Art.
I was born in 1998 to a soap opera actress; my mother played Blake Marler on Guiding Light for seventeen years. The camera emerged as a satellite to our life. I learned to walk in CBS studios, a multiverse of foregrounds and backgrounds, conditioned by the requirements of the camera, figure, gesture, and light. In this way, the first world I learned to navigate was a stage; a design always bending toward fiction and form.
Interested in the potential for lyric within fixed codas of space, I have begun making photographs within mid-tier corporate offices. In their materiality, architecture, and graphics, such spaces persist as slipping visuals of a lapsed corporate era. They cite problems of time, both dating and displacing the evolving correspondences between technology and the body. I am interested in engaging with these office spaces through analog optics—photographing matter with matter—to understand relationships between the fixed and the fleeting in an increasingly immaterial world. The office fatigues; the office endures.
As the workspace takes on its spectral condition, the worker becomes problematized. The growing Consciousness Industry encourages solutions for body trouble: motivational workshops, executive coaching, and ‘mindful’ devices (smartwatches, fitness trackers, etc.) all promote self-optimization, -surveillance, and -management, ultimately weaponizing the self against the body—and making swift work of the datatization of our unconscious selves. Fascinated and disturbed by these techniques, I am attentive to the possibilities within video to speak to the commodification of the ‘conscious’ within Corporate ecosystems, and to agitate relationships between the self, sex, and technologies of surveillance.