Americo Gariety (b. 1992) is an artist living and working in Salt Lake City. Americo enjoys drawing, making videos and making pictures. Americo earned a degree in Photography at Brigham Young Univeristy. He experienced an epistimological shift away from mormonism during his time at the university, which sparked a new interest in photography and photography’s relationship to man’s perception of truth. Americo uses photography’s complex relationship to both truth and deceit to dissect and examine man’s own relationship to relative and objective truth, and in turn examines the role of magic in man’s perception of these truths.
Willful Suspense
The work Willful Suspense is born out of my interest in process—the process and the rationalizations that occur in the mind as one consciously rejects belief. I hope to analyze how belief and belief systems translate directly to truth in the mind of the believer and in the process of separating belief from truth in the attempt to understand and become truly objective. I wanted the photographs to portray the real world while, at the same time, referencing supernatural moments of semi-lucid dreaming that occur between being awake and falling asleep. I am interested in the reasoning behind purposefully suspending belief. I also hope to pinpoint the moment when belief in something stops becoming a choice and turns into a reality. Is what we believe always true? Do we always believe the truth?
To view more of Americo Gariety’s work please visit their website.