MASK & MIRROR / 2017 (exhibited in 2023)
This series was made between 2015 and 2017 while I was working out of a small family cabin built in 1954 on Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest of the US. The cabin is full of family belongings including: piles of old books, records, paintings, drawings, boxes of old photographs, journals, dream diaries and an impressive collection of strange and meaningful objects, including old masks, broken instruments, stones, feathers, primitive figurines, clay bowls and fetishes. One day, I picked up this mask, unaware of its origins, and I began using my camera and my body to conjure associations and to build psychic memories in response to the mask. I associate the series now with my continued interest in photography’s materiality, the woman’s body as medium, surrealist strategies, and the occult history of photography. When sequencing the series for exhibition in 2023 I began to construct new meanings from the photographs. The series as exhibited might depict a transformation, or the staging of one’s own birth, a symbolic symmetrical death where another figure emerges from the head of another, a kind of twinning. I am, at present, unable to commit to any singular reading of these photographs. Years later, I learned that the mask is a depiction of Semar, from Javanese mythology who frequently appears in wayang shadow plays. Semar has many origin stories and genealogies, but his name is said to derive from the Javanese word samar meaning dim, obscure, mysterious. All photographs are 8x10 Silver Gelatin contact prints from 8x10 negatives printed in my personal darkroom.
This series was made between 2015 and 2017 while I was working out of a small family cabin built in 1954 on Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest of the US. The cabin is full of family belongings including: piles of old books, records, paintings, drawings, boxes of old photographs, journals, dream diaries and an impressive collection of strange and meaningful objects, including old masks, broken instruments, stones, feathers, primitive figurines, clay bowls and fetishes. One day, I picked up this mask, unaware of its origins, and I began using my camera and my body to conjure associations and to build psychic memories in response to the mask. I associate the series now with my continued interest in photography’s materiality, the woman’s body as medium, surrealist strategies, and the occult history of photography. When sequencing the series for exhibition in 2023 I began to construct new meanings from the photographs. The series as exhibited might depict a transformation, or the staging of one’s own birth, a symbolic symmetrical death where another figure emerges from the head of another, a kind of twinning. I am, at present, unable to commit to any singular reading of these photographs. Years later, I learned that the mask is a depiction of Semar, from Javanese mythology who frequently appears in wayang shadow plays. Semar has many origin stories and genealogies, but his name is said to derive from the Javanese word samar meaning dim, obscure, mysterious. All photographs are 8x10 Silver Gelatin contact prints from 8x10 negatives printed in my personal darkroom.
MASK & MIRROR
