This Untitled series began in 2013 and is ongoing. The photographs could be thought of as still-lifes, but it is also documents of deterioration, movement and experimentation using my own body alongside other objects. I’ve made plaster casts of my feet and legs and use them in the photographs as stand-ins for myself, or as dance partners.
Fruits and vegetables began to enter the work, as familiar objects with unusual forms – either overgrown, mutant, or molding. I began, in a simple way, to choreograph myself alongside of these objects, and eventually in some cases allow them to take my place. The interaction between my own body, representations of my body, and the other attendant objects create composed but contradictory images that are often be seen as erotic but awkward. When creating these scenes I allow myself to be surprised by the things around me. A vegetable echoes a limb, something cumbersome becomes sexual, something inanimate becomes invigorated. I play with the scale of prints to achieve changes in meaning. I use blown-up photographs of textures of the objects I work with as backdrops to make things in the foreground look impossibly small or precious. I’m interested in what it is to have a body as a dancer and a woman and what it is to live among a messy accumulation of things. I can best speak to that through pictures. Decay, movement, surrealism, history, scale shifts, play, metaphor, and substitution are the tools I use to articulate my ideas about these subjects.
