Ursula 3 #5 by Hannah Whitaker

Ursula 3 #5 by Hannah Whitaker

This collection of photographs expands on a character who has been the focal point of my work for a few years: Ursula. I leave ambiguous exactly who and what she is. Her nature is something between an AI, a fictional character, an avatar, a product of the collective imagination, and a living, fully dimensional, being.

I have previously made two bodies of work with her. The first I published with Image Text Ithaca Press in a book called Ursula. These photographs also comprise my genesis NFT drop. The second I showed recently at Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris in an exhibition called Shadow Detail. This third body of work is the first made specifically for the NFT space. I’m calling it Ursula 3, as the third iteration of the project, and in a nod to Web3.

These photographs incorporate some of the photographic techniques that I have used in the past in cultivating the mystique of Ursula—silhouettes, special effect lighting, and printed backgrounds. For Ursula 3 I combined these techniques with a more hands-on approach to set building. I had several props and set materials fabricated out of mirrored plexi, including patterned screens, Ursula’s profile, and her hands. I also had made a turtleneck, gloves, and hoods in reflective materials. In addition to using these props, I incorporated rear projection, a technique used in a pre-digital era of Hollywood filmmaking.

The sets are more complex than I had done previously, with the intent of making the space in the photographs stranger, more layered, and more difficult to decipher. The resulting photographs evoke the established language of the Ursula lineage but usher her into an increasingly synthetic universe.

Edition: 1 of 1

Commissioned by Obscura