THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Chad Coombs’ Polaroids are small psychological scenes where identity, memory, culture, and belief push against each other.
June 7, 2026
INTERVIEW
PHOTOGRAPHY Chad Coombs
INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs
Chad Coombs approaches the image as a constructed field, where identity, perception, and consciousness are not presented as stable conditions but examined as systems under pressure. Working across photography, collage, and painting, his practice resists the idea of the medium as a passive tool. Instead, process becomes central to meaning. Analog photography, hand-built imagery, direct mark-making, distortion, fragmentation, and recontextualization function as methods of inquiry, allowing the work to question how identity is shaped, interrupted, and read.
In The Architecture of Consciousness, Chad extends this investigation through a Polaroid-based body of work structured across four interconnected series: Dear Diary, Interior Architecture, Reconstruction, and Foundation. Each series examines a different layer of consciousness: Dear Diary explores identity as a negotiation between personal autonomy and social expectation; Interior Architecture examines emotion as a force shaped by biology, memory, culture, and social performance; Reconstruction investigates memory as an act of continual rebuilding rather than a stable record of the past; and Foundation considers belief as the framework through which individuals interpret existence. Together, these works trace a movement through identity, emotion, memory, and belief, not as separate psychological categories but as interdependent systems. Identity informs emotion; emotion affects memory; memory reshapes belief; and belief becomes the structure through which reality is interpreted.
Portraiture operates here not as representation, but as a site of construction. Figures are altered, layered, and destabilized, positioned within domestic interiors, symbolic landscapes, and cultural imagery that suggest the invisible pressures shaping human thought. Chad’s lived experience with autism also informs his sensitivity to behavior, contradiction, and social structure, shaping a practice to question patterns of perception. His work asks viewers to consider not only what they see, but how their seeing has been conditioned.
Across the series, Chad proposes that consciousness is not fixed, but continually assembled. As he writes in his project statement, “What feels permanent within the mind, is often the result of an ongoing process of construction.” This statement sits at the center of the work. What appears stable within the self is revealed as process: shaped by experience, culture, memory, and the act of interpretation itself.
“When I was little, I would play with my grandpa’s cameras, I really enjoyed how a camera allowed a person to isolate a visual experience. It allowed me to zero in on what was worthwhile and trim away the outside noise both visually and audibly. In high-school I got my first camera and simply used it to document party experiences with me and my friends, it wasn’t until I saw a Richard Avedon documentary, Darkness and Light, that my life truly changed. That documentary gave me goose bumps like I had never had before, and I realized you could make people feel in ways I didn’t think were possible via photographs. The camera became less of a tool and more of a framework for understanding experience.
I believe the camera also allows me to retain a bit of control that I feel is outside of my reach normally. Everything within the frame is there because I either include it, or because I have positioned it within. It’s a visual puzzle where the pieces need to be found or discovered as opposed to create from nothing. I think that’s a large part of why I use a camera for almost everything, and my paintings are created as if they are photographs within my mind as well.”
IN CONVERSATION WITH CHAD COOMBS
TPL: The Architecture of Consciousness is structured around identity, emotion, memory, and belief. How did you arrive at these four categories, and why did they become the organising framework for the project? How much of this inquiry comes from personal experience, and how much comes from observing the world around you?
CHAD: This series started after a day I almost lost my battle with depression. It was a week after and I felt a strong need to turn what had happened into not only something visual, but something good and worthwhile. So, I created the Depression image and the “by the” images. It was a way for me to take control back from something that had almost taken everything from me. It wasn’t until 3 months later that I was in a safe head space that I could re-engage with this series and I promised myself moving forward I was going to be brutally honest with my art work, and I was also going to rediscover who I was and who I wanted to become moving forward. So, this series was a parallel process alongside my own personal recovery. A representation of all the work I was putting into myself and the questions I was asking myself too.
TPL: Polaroids are often associated with immediacy, intimacy, and evidence. How do you reframe or challenge those associations within this body of work?
CHAD: With my Polaroid work, I use the medium less as documentation and more as a way to translate psychological states. The immediacy is important because it reflects the impulsive nature of how the work exists within my mind. The imperfections, fragmentation, and physical manipulation interrupt the sense of certainty people often associate with photography and push the images toward something more internal, emotional, and unresolved.
TPL: Your use of distortion and fragmentation appears to interrupt the authority of the photographic image. Do you see this as a critique of photography’s relationship to truth?
CHAD: I don’t think photography has truth any more than memory does. It's always just one perspective no matter how accurate its portrayal or documentation was. Two people can witness or photograph the exact same moment, but they can each tell/show very different results/stories.
My work is more a reflection of how my mind works than an intentional critique of photography itself, it isn’t intended as an attack on photography, but it does question the assumption that photographs are objective or stable.
TPL: Popular culture, advertising, and everyday imagery appear throughout the work. How do these external visual systems influence the formation of private consciousness?
CHAD: I think visual culture shapes us far more deeply than we recognize. We are constantly surrounded by imagery telling us what to desire, how to behave, who to become, and what success or identity should look like. That level of repetition and exposure inevitably affects how we understand both ourselves and the world around us.
TPL: Taken together, Dear Diary, Interior Architecture, Reconstruction, and Foundation suggest that consciousness is always under construction. What remains unresolved for you in this project, and where might that unresolved space lead next?
CHAD: I am currently trying to sort out how to move forward with this body of work. I have actually found myself to be more secure in the realization that removing oneself from as many systems as possible is the best path, but I am also still struggling with what my own purpose can be moving forward. As much as this series was all about trying to discover what my own identity is, and what identity as a whole actually means. I've kind of come full circle and realized that identity may never be fixed or fully knowable, and I think the unresolved nature of that realization is probably what the next stage of the work will continue exploring.
TPL: Who or what has most shaped your visual language? This could include artists, photographers, writers, films, music, personal experiences, or cultural imagery.
CHAD: Richard Avedon has had the biggest effect on how I understand visual language. He taught me that an image can stand on its own without a word of explanation if it's strong enough, and the words can be like the background music to the vocals.
Art can truly connect in ways nothing else can, and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
TPL: When you begin a new body of work, do you start with an image, a concept, a material process, or an emotional condition?
CHAD: Earlier in my practice, work often began intuitively through image or emotion. More recently I have become increasingly interested in conceptual structure and written development before production begins. I really try to identify weaknesses and repetitive tendencies beforehand now, as opposed to my earlier method.
TPL: Describe what your working environment looks like? Do you work from a studio, from home, or across different spaces depending on the project?
CHAD: I live very minimally, my Polaroid work all is created in a simple home office like setup that’s in my living room, and my painting is done on top of a deep freeze in my furnace room.
TPL: What part of the artistic process do you find most difficult: beginning the work, developing it, editing it, or letting it be seen by others?
CHAD: The most difficult part is always trying to come up with a meaningful idea when one can't come naturally. Beyond that, the process steps are all the most enjoyable for me, I love the process more than any other part. Once a piece or a series is completed, I kind of feel sad for a moment. The marketing and networking part of an art career is easily my least favorite though, I struggle with that part and wish I didn’t need to do it. As per the work being seen, I love having my work available via publications and exhibitions. I don’t like any attention to myself, but I really enjoy it when it can be on my artwork.
TPL: Is there a project, scale, medium, or subject you have not yet attempted but feel would challenge you in the next stage of your practice?
CHAD: I would love to spend time living in a different part of the world and allowing unfamiliar environments and cultures to influence my work. I think people discover new layers of themselves through new experiences, and I’m interested in how displacement, adaption, and observation might reshape both my thinking and my practice moving forward.
As per mediums, I really have grown very comfortable with the Polaroid SX70 Camera and my Medium Format Bronica, I could happily only ever shoot with the two for the rest of my life and be very very happy.
TPL: Your work asks viewers to question how they see. What do you hope they might come to understand about you, or about themselves, through encountering your images?
CHAD: The truth is I don’t know the answers to so many things, and I don’t expect others to have or find those answers either. The only thing I know for certain is that we all should be asking a lot more questions in general. We can discover so much more about each other and ourselves within questions, even questions without answers can provide more growth than answers without questions can.
TPL: When you are not creating art, what else may we find Chad Coombs doing?
CHAD: Outside of making artwork, my life is actually fairly quiet and simple. During the winter months I tend to focus heavily on my Polaroid practice, while the summer months are usually spent working on my outdoor medium format photography series. Beyond that, I'm often working my day job as a server, researching subjects that catch my interest, or spending time outdoors. I spend a lot of time observing, thinking, and processing the world around me, which honestly doesn’t stop when the artwork does.
