Each of the images depicts a calendrical month, and each ‘month-image’ is the compilation of (+/- 30) photographs captured during that month. Recently, my inclination to take photographs has waned, too often my response to the contemporary photograph is disappointment; I am left wanting, it doesn't speak to me. It is too staid to reflect the frenetic state of my high-blood-pressure-single-mon-sixty-hour-work-week-no-safety-net-twenty-first-century-life. My response to this is to gather my photographs into a pile, one on top of the other, and to use this heap of creative evidence as my palette, and with it to ‘paint’ these time-based conglomerated abstractions.
Digitized images stream. Despair made smaller on a screen, reframed and unreal, as if the purpose is to leave one desensitized to horror. From the comfort of my home-- through the window of my computer--I witness unspeakable suffering, and then I go about my life, unchanged, impotent to affecting any outcome of meaningful consequence. Chaos, disorder in the world, one looks closely or looks away. There is intimacy and distance at once.
A portrait of my broken family, outside the constraints of space and time and discretion.
A person flawed or spoiled in character or worth. A person no longer desirable or valuable because of something that has happened.
Relentless, these voices in our heads.
CUT
I cut myself. In subject and style these cuts are reminiscent of children’s drawings. They are simple and iconographic—loosely drawn in outline form. They speak an of a wounded entry into the space of the self.
Innocence lost.
Your epidermis is showing.
Cultures, both codified and unconscious, define women's vaginas as passive, receptive, responsive, acceptant. I use this yielding, malleable material as the pliant flesh for the characters in my story. A narrative which speaks of a willing and resigned acceptance of domination. Receptacle is about the theft of innocence, the betrayal of trust, the sacrifice of oneself to the needs of others, and the price for these transmutations.
“Somehow every indignity the female suffers ultimately comes to be symbolized in a sexuality that is held to be her responsibility, her shame. It can be summarized in one four-letter word. And the word is not fuck, it’s cunt. Our self-contempt originates in this; in knowing that we are cunt”
Kate Millett
Uneaten cake from a would-be celebration, November 8, 2016.
I am less inclined toward individual photographs, and more drawn toward photography's plurality, and the ubiquitous role it now plays in our lives.
Moments remembered from a childhood.
Preparations for my deathbed flashback.
I WOULDN'T DO THAT IF I WERE YOU
A picture book for children, and the adults who raise them.
All images are copyrighted.