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 art of photography is disappointment; I am left wanting. The single photograph doesn't always speak to me. It is too staid to reflect the frenetic state of my high-blood-pressure-fifty-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.
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 all at once. Digitized images stream, despair made smaller on a screen, reframed and unreal, as if the whole purpose is to leave one desensitized, anesthetized to horror.
Some say the soul is stolen when a photograph is taken. Surely something more than likeness is captured?
T.M.I.
The image and information overload of our modern world is all too much.
I am less inclined to place value on an individual image, and more interested in using photography to speak to the ubiquitous role that photography now plays in our lives.
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 happened.
“ 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
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. Narratives which speak of a willing and resigned acceptance of domination; my images are about the theft of innocence, the betrayal of trust, the sacrifice of oneself to the needs of others, and the price that is paid for these transmutations. It is from this gendered and monstrous self, full of rage, that this work emerges.
I cut images into my flesh. In subject and style these cuts are reminiscent of children’s drawings. They are simple and iconographic—loosely drawn in outline form. These ‘drawings’ refer to penetration. They speak of sexual, physical and metaphorical entry into the space of the self.
Moments remembered from childhood.
The leaving, the going, the getting to the place where one is heading.
Substandard, flawed, accidental, ill-conceived unredeemable...redeemable photographs.
I WOULDN'T DO THAT IF I WERE YOU
A picture book for children and adults - adults who worry, and children who don’t know to worry.
Preparations for my deathbed flashback.
All images are copyrighted.