MY OWN JOURNEY FOLLOWS NO SUCH LINEAR NARRATIVE. IT STARTED THE MOMENT I FOUND THE PHOTOGRAPH BUT HAS MEANDERED EVER SINCE, THROUGH UNCHARTED RESEARCH AND TO NO OBVIOUS DESTINATION.
-TACITA DEAN, Girl Stowaway, 1994
Landmarks, film still video, archival footage, still photographs
"Tough old bird you are..." collage, family photographs, family album
"I will not come to take..." kallitype, archival pigment print, pictorico, thread
"Home=come in and see" archival pigment print
"Guess you know me..." kallitype, archival pigment print
"What was I laughing at? I have forgotten." kallitype, archival pigment print, pictorico
"dad & mom know I can not verify..." kallitype, archival pigment print
"That lumbered all the way..." collodion, archival pigment print
In this body of work I am appropriating slivers of images, text, and artifacts from the familial archive. There is an obstructed rationale of what a photograph is and does, as well as a displacement of the contexts of photographic processes. Incorporating multiple image-making properties and practices, the process of how we contextualize a photograph's objectness and our associations in relationship to photographic material is exposed.
The original content, the index, becomes secondary - taking its unaccustomed place on the periphery of significance. Distinct passageways emerge and are found within the distillation of expectations and longings attached to any familial or institutional space.
Each individual work incorporates alternative processes, such as the kallitype and collodion, as well as various methods of collage. These mediums string together disparate images and artifacts to create an entirely new, complex image.
The success of the Archive represents only half of the material – the half that has survived. The matter lies somewhere in between what is present and what is missing. Perhaps these instances are the keys – the markers connecting bodies and identities, generations and histories; the physical indication of an unidentified connection