Seven Students

Seven Students is an installation of seven portraits printed on overhead transparency paper, layered and projected through a found overhead projector onto a silver projection screen, mounted on a wheeled AV cart salvaged from my classroom. Every material, save the printed images, was found within the school where I teach.

The portraits, taken at the start of the school year, document a cohort I taught between 2024 and 2025, my first year building the I.T. Creative program at Hughes STEM High School. Stacked and projected together, their individual likenesses dissolve into a single, ethereal composite, anonymous, abstracted, and inseparable from one another. What remains is not a portrait of any one student, but of a relationship: a record of a cohort who learned and transformed together, and of my own transformation alongside them.

The overhead projector and screen are tools from my classroom that still function as intended, repurposed here to project portraits rather than lecture notes or diagrams. The piece is intentionally modular: this is only one possible configuration among hundreds of students I have taught, and it could be remade endlessly with different faces, different years.

The title remains plain and literal by design. I want the metaphor to live in the image, not the language: light passing through, images overlapping, identities merging. Seven Students asks what a portrait actually is when it can no longer belong to one person, and suggests that teaching itself, like this projection, is provisional, cumulative, and always changing.

Seven inkjet-printed overhead transparencies, classroom overhead projector, screen, and media cart.