110 pages
full colour
hardcover
22 x 28 cm
Winner of First Edition Photo book Purchase Award, Toronto Metropolitan University Special Collections Library.
Frisson! was shown in a solo exhibition as printed excerpts at Image Arts at the Creative School, Toronto, Canada in March 2025.
Styled by Olivia Connick
Styled by Plato Sazon
Forward, written by Johanna Hatlem:
When you are young, suburban scape is opportunity; a tender time to bring something up out of the nothingness. Each streetlight scene a chance for meaning, each wooded area lined with memories, once rare moments written over one another. It is a moment to say, this piece of world matters to no one else but me, and it does not even matter if it isn’t true, as long as it is felt. A million lives and deaths occur in the back of its cars, its fields and its renovated basements. And the best part is you could never tell.
Frisson is defined as a sudden feeling of excitement or fear, particularly when one anticipates that something is about to happen. Frisson is also the French word for shiver or thrill. These sentiments define the constant feelings I had during my adolescence; an act of waiting and anxious hopefulness for a spark of excitement that brought me out of the banality of everyday life. Community is one of the most important factors in one’s ability to formulate a sense of identity during their formative years. However, my adolescence was coloured by feelings of alienation that came from being a queer and racialized person in the predominantly white and heteronormative suburbs and schools in which I lived and attended. In my search for communities that reflected my identity, I was only met with an immense lack, resulting in feelings of existential otherness that permeated the majority of my high school years. I was left with a constant pining for a sense of belonging that most of my peers got to experience, like a prolonged sense of frisson.
American professor, Andre Cavalcante describes Tumblr as a “queer utopia” that allows for those whose identities exist outside the majority to find community and formulate a sense of self, as well as provide an alternative space outside of real life to express our thoughts and interests. This is what Tumblr was for me: a space that reflected my identity and interests, provided an escape from the mundanity of school and suburban living, and allowed an avenue through which I could formulate a deeper relationship with myself and my identity. Much of my adolescence was spent in the lawless lands of Tumblr, and my identity was merged with the chaotic abundance of media that migrated from around the world and through its digital voids. Amongst the chaos, it was the strange imagery depicting familiar spaces reminiscent of my own everyday life that dominated my timeline and resonated with me the most. Fashion theorist Rian Phin’s video essay, “mysterious mundane online photo culture + fashion” discusses the phenomenon of “mysterious and mundane imagery” that has become viral in online spaces such as Tumblr, connecting their virality to their ability to incite feelings of familiarity—despite these images containing subjects and memories unknown to their viewers. While these images are often strange and almost fantastical in their aesthetic quality, the moments they depict often reflect banal and mundane experiences that are collectively shared amongst their viewers, contributing to their overall allure.
Frisson! exists in this in-between of the familiar and the strange, the personal and the shared experiences of an adolescence spent in the digital age. Barbed wire fences, winding roads leading to nowhere, and light emitting from digital screens become motifs used to evoke a world built up from the chronically online and dissonant chaos that was my suburban youth. It exists in a liminal space between my personal memories and the shared digital memories of my peers, reflected in the songs and movies that defined our collective adolescence and were used to formulate our own identities. Through fashion and staging, Frisson! engages in a performance of nostalgia that references a contemporary movement of young people interested in emulating a period of online presence on Tumblr that brimmed with alternative aesthetic movements and styles (eg., the return of “Indie Sleaze” and the “Tumblr Girl” style of the 2010s), perhaps a consequence of living in a period of uncertainty and anxieties over a future that isn’t promised to us. Much like the mysterious and mundane images that continue to circulate through the internet, Frisson! does not situate itself in the past or the future, but rather in the forever cyclical and capricious present.
Documentation by Sai Bagni
Documentation by Sai Bagni
Documentation by Sai Bagni
Documentation by Sai Bagni
Documentation by Sai Bagni
Documentation by Sai Bagni
Documentation by Sai Bagni