Single Rooms by Steven Beckly

Issue 24

Single Rooms is a series of images exploring the interdependent relationship between home and identity, stemming from my experiences of inhabiting separate spaces simultaneously. Disconnected environments that I equally defined as “home” influenced my emotions, thoughts, and behaviour differently. What resulted was an awareness of apparent divisions in my identity, and accompanying feelings of unease, instability, and impermanence. My homes were separate but equal extensions of my identity, and I began to think as much about their influence on me as my influence on them. These ideas inspired me to explore the home-identity relationship when a stable and permanent environment defined as “home” is removed.

Rented rooms in motels, hotels, and inns were used as the settings for the photographs. Functioning as temporary homes, these spaces provided adaptable histories from which tenuous narratives could be created. Subjects were given a few hours to inhabit their rooms, and encouraged to draw inspiration from their environments for a character to portray. From these new relationships they established with their surroundings, transitory characters were created from these transitory spaces. The ambiguous identities formed from the negotiations between the subjects and their environments form both the context for and content of the images.

Steven Beckly is a Toronto, CA based artist.
To view more of Steven's work, please visit his website