Erskine, Portraiture Study V, 2015, digital photo, self-portrait
STATEMENT
Motivated by mythmaking, poetics and Jungian psychology, my work in interdisciplinary lens-based media and collaboration investigates experimental approaches to portraiture. With photography, video and performance, I examine personal 'myths of transformation' through encounters with fabric at chosen liminal sites. Fabric enhances the hypnagogic quality of the 'body forms' in my images: isolating, concealing, restricting, or defining movements and tensions within the human figure. Creating texture and form in the folds, fabric suggests another entity or archetypal figure. In numerous works, printing digital images on silk banners further animates the body form as the cloth moves and breathes in the air. By blurring the indexical quality of representational portraiture, larger psychological or metaphysical themes emerge.
Embodiment and improvisation are central to my working process. Inspiration and symbolic content develop best during ‘active imagination’ exercises which include movement and playful experimentation. In performance, I turn to my ‘self’ as subject – simultaneously becoming both performer and stage manager in preparation of materials. Gauze and fabric create liminal thresholds - transitional spaces from which to examine inner struggles and stages of life. Utilizing an archive of raw video, varied fabrics, and rudimentary architectural structures, my artistic practice evolves through a continual progression of creating, viewing, recalling, reading, interviewing, researching theory, and expanding iterations. A completed series takes time to develop as the decisive quality and multi-layered depth of each image is uncovered. This protracted resolution requires ‘witness-consciousness' and a non-judgmental attitude; ideas will eventually ‘resolve’ and lead to greater emotional and conceptual meaning.
My exhibition concepts involve installation of layered self-portraiture (diptych or triptych) exploring memory and place in terms of human interaction, apparent time displacement, the fundamental aspects of sound, and the symbolic function of spaces. Original sound tracks, incidental performance, and extended photographic series further enrich the multi-layered, temporal quality of my installations. By juxtaposing fragments of images or creating theatrical spaces that allude to myths of self, journey or transformation, I invite the viewer to consider dream states at multiple levels – the personal or collective.