This is an ongoing series of work where I investigate the nature of portraiture and self-portraiture. I take photos of myself and also recycle images taken of me by others. In the photographs Examined at 9 years, I show a group of photographs taken by my orthodontist. My twin brother, Arek, and I underwent extensive orthodontic work for a number of years, and these images were essentially the "before" pictures of those procedures. These photos draw attention to the scrutinizing nature of portraiture. I appreciate the explicit examination atmosphere in these images, the level of tension and vulnerability is clear.

The first time that I traveled to Armenia, I was a self-conscious Armenian-American teenager, unsure of who I was and who I was not. It seemed to me that children in Armenia were free from such questions of identity. In a series of images of boys in Armenia, I try to express this feeling of freedom that the lack of this type of self-scrutiny would provide. I juxtaposed these images with the pictures of the orthodontic exam in a show entitled Where I Last Was. The show was an exploration of the divide between Diaspora and homeland, self-consciousness and blissful unawareness, and an effort to visually fuse these dichotomies. The photographs from my travels were all taken in the region of Karabagh, a newly acquired and war-torn region which itself was and still continues to undergo an awkward and at times volatile transformation in identity as it merges with Armenia.