We live in a world oversaturated with images, but how many of them are truly real? This question lingers in my mind and drives my practice. I’m drawn to documenting spaces shaped by human presence and intervention, especially moments that feel transient or overlooked. 

I collect scenes that hold an odd tension, where beauty, humor, and discomfort collide. A broken bottle of beet juice on the grocery store floor. A Colt 45 bottle used as a flower vase. Cheetah print underwear caught in the wrong place. These strange and indulgent fragments, paired with objects like cigarettes or birthday cake, become my visual vocabulary. 

Through collage in Photoshop, I fuse and distort these images, layering and cutting them into one another until they exist in a kind of limbo. Music guides my hand; lyrics catch me mid-thought, insisting on becoming titles, rerouting my mind toward new directions. The result is a set of constructed moments, part memory, part fiction. 

I flirt with the photograph as a sculptural object, wanting to dance around it, to ponder its presence. I let the image break free from the confines of the wall, interrupting us physically blurring the lines of materiality and reshaping our understanding of what a photograph can be. 

These explorations create temporal pauses and fabricated memories that question not only what we see, but what we choose to believe. 

Alison Bachorik is an Albany, NY–based artist whose work explores the intersections of photography, materiality, and constructed memory. She holds an M.F.A. from the University at Albany, where she received the Distinguished M.F.A. Thesis Award, as well as a B.F.A. from the New Hampshire Institute of Art and an A.S. in Digital Media from Hudson Valley Community College. Bachorik has exhibited throughout the Capital Region, New York City, and New England. In addition to her studio practice, she is a full-time staff member at the Ellsworth Kelly Studio and teaches digital media at Hudson Valley Community College and Jamestown Community College. In 2025, she was awarded the Artist Thrive & Grow Grant by The Arts Center of the Capital Region.