W I L T

Here's some photos
https://www.flickr.com/photos/147242456@N06/albums/72157676176714773

D A W N

D A W N - A cinematic masterpiece coming soon to a theater near no one 

         I imagined this project as the opening sequence of a non-existent movie about the unraveling of social order told through a woman, Dawn (played by Annie Connolly) , drawn to kill and an altar boy drawn into sin. The altar boy doesn't appear in this version of the opening but he's off screen praying for Dawn's soul because he sense that she has transgressed all boundaries and killed. While I had these elaborate plans for what this fake movie would look like, I wanted the title sequence not to reveal them. I focused instead on the interaction of Annie's character with her things - her clothes and especially her cigarette. I was really inspired by the work of Kenneth Anger and wanted to recreate the charged relationship he crafts between his subjects and their things. So I imagined the cigarette, the blue fuzz of her coat, her pink shoes against the snow holding the tension, passion, and tragedy of the murder she was going to commit. Visually and aurally I waned to evoke the melodrama of old Hollywood Cinema. Marshall McLuhan wrote, "We approach the new with the psychological conditions and sensory responses to the old" (94). Looking at the modes of classical cinema as patterns we have been psychologically conditioned to consume, I see them working similarly to McLuhan's theory of the alphabet - as a construction of fragmented parts into an imagined whole that as a result shape our ways of seeing and thinking. I wanted to call upon these expectations to consider how my view of a female subject is negotiated through them.

What's that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

         I’m interested in the image not only as an aesthetic experience but as a manipulative one. The images below come from a small photo book given to me by my mother a few months ago. I’ve quickly come to cherish the images that fill it, photographs of women I will never know. It makes sense that the people captured in these moments are distant from me; I'm not supposed to know them as they were in these moments - grandmothers and great-grandmothers, are not young. While most of the people living in this book are now dead these images momentarily resurrect them - but it's a strange kind of disjunctive resurrection where the person whose presence I feel is seen in a time and space far removed from my experience of them. The image has the power to evoke both presence and absence  while remaining fixed.

My grandmother, Adele, stops scrubbing to pose for my grandfather's photo - I wonder if  he helped her clean?

  
                                                             The tree across from her porch
 

My mother’s photo book also speaks to a specific relationship to the image. These images, taken by my grandfather sixty some odd years ago are not unlike images I consume,create, and share today. However, while my grandfather had these images printed and bound, so that I can hold them today I share the equivalent image on Instagram. In my work I am interested in exploring how the images you consume and the way you consume them shape your consciousness particularly in terms of a rapidly changing culture of images.

For these collages I pulled images from the 1966 book to be alive! based on a film of the same name . Using digital manipulation I hoped to distance the found images from their visual and narrative contexts. 

                                                              T E A S E

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D I V E

 M U N C H