Thank God I am not Neil Bhat (2025)

Conceptual artwork, context specific installation of photographs and objects of leisure & labor, performance

This MFA graduation show asked a single question: When am I different?

The entire work stems from a single photograph of a bartender in 2016, and an entire future extrapolated from it. Images of an AI-aged barman, a line of Aloha shirts as uniforms for the performance of labour, and a performance repeating the word "Am"; a stating and restating of existence.

Each image of the bartender is subtly different from the last, each aloha shirt is from a different time and place, and each "Am" becomes a new homophone each time it is repeated:  Homme, Ham, I’m, Uhm, Ohm, Om, and so on. But it isn’t the meaning that is different from one “Am” to the next; the difference between self from one moment to the next is imperceptible yet ontological.