SOUTH SOUND | 2013
The series South Sound was made while I was living and working out of a small family cabin built in 1954 on Puget Sound. 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 night I happened to pick up a copy of Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung's last major work before he died), and then I immediately remembered a strange photograph I found in a shoe box under the bed which featured a priest next to an African woman in a green dress. My initial instinct was to juxtapose the photo and the book to see what would happen. From this initial act, South Sound was born. I think of this first image as the key to understanding the rest of the series as it features Jung's book Mysterium Coniunctionis– an inquiry into the separation and alchemical synthesis of psychic opposites. The juxtapositions in the final images are meant to be suggestive rather than expository, relying on the formal and material qualities of the objects within them, as well as their mysterious textual and photographic contents, in order to elicit responses in the viewer that range from synthetic story-making to mute, impassable aporia.
The series South Sound was made while I was living and working out of a small family cabin built in 1954 on Puget Sound. 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 night I happened to pick up a copy of Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung's last major work before he died), and then I immediately remembered a strange photograph I found in a shoe box under the bed which featured a priest next to an African woman in a green dress. My initial instinct was to juxtapose the photo and the book to see what would happen. From this initial act, South Sound was born. I think of this first image as the key to understanding the rest of the series as it features Jung's book Mysterium Coniunctionis– an inquiry into the separation and alchemical synthesis of psychic opposites. The juxtapositions in the final images are meant to be suggestive rather than expository, relying on the formal and material qualities of the objects within them, as well as their mysterious textual and photographic contents, in order to elicit responses in the viewer that range from synthetic story-making to mute, impassable aporia.
