Ma-Yi Theater Company commissioned me to create this photo illustration for their recent production The Sugar House on The Edge of The Wilderness.
The show, which is about two teenage adoptees dealing with loss and survival in NYC, is a sort of modern day fairy tale loosely based on Hansel and Gretel. We wanted to express the grittiness of the world in which they live and how their lives have been fractured by their experiences, thus the decision to create a piece out from discarded photos on an actual New York street.
I started with a portrait of two of the actors in the show provided by the theater, which I broke into dozens of individual overlapping pieces digitally and then printed out individually. I then physically remade the image, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, placing the photos directly on a sidewalk in Brooklyn amidst some genuine NYC trash!