ALI COONEY-URIBE

Tropism focuses on the prevailing power of television as a source of entertainment, knowledge, and basic visual stimuli.

The television is this cold, glowing box that we let into our homes like an innocuous stranger and allow it to write the facts in our head, often without question.

Television is the language by which we connect and disconnect from other people.

It grows on us.

The word ‘tropism’ refers to a plant’s tendency to grow toward a source of light, and in a more contemporary sense, it refers to the common plots, characters, and situations found in movies and television shows. 

Each image in my series is a sort of shrine to particular obsessions of certain groups of television watchers.

In this way, television functions as a religious icon, something that is both watched and watching.

Our devotion to the television turns its place into an altar with human attention as the fetishes for a shrine.

Like an Alice in Wonderland looking glass, it is an infallible window into other worlds, and often tells us if we believe hard enough, it’s all true.