The three autobiographical stories featuring self-portraits were exhibited in New York in 2018. The project was born out of a fascination with the connection between the object and the viewer, the way as John Berger points out, "we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”
The opening lines in the narrative accompanying Mirror Mirror came to me as I studied a friend's photograph. Hers looked nothing like what I would later shoot. But I was taken by my reaction to the photograph, the way it connected me instantly to a complicated mix of feelngs I had buried deep inside.
We carry so many stories waiting to be released.
I wonder whether you, too, have a mother who is a gardener.
And whether you, the daughter of a gardener, desired to be like but also different from you mother, so that after dabbling in the garden for years with thumbs less green than hers you moved on to pursue other interests, such as photography.
I wonder whether your interest in photography grew into a passion, one that is as strong as your mother’s love for gardening but that is different, that is your own.
I wonder whether one day you began to photograph flowers instead of grow them and whether you believed at the time that your choice of subject matter was inspired merely by a wish to capture beauty.
I wonder whether, after some time, you started to notice that your photographs of flowers brought you closer to your mother as you began to perceive a little bit of her in each one.
I wonder whether, after recognizing your mother in your photographs of flowers, you began to understand them as perfect tokens of your long-felt desire to be both alike and different, the two of you, she the gardener and you the photographer, connected by a passion and a love of flowers, hers fleeting with the changing seasons and yours, in their photographic captures, more permanent representations of the same.
Wanting to explore the dynamic between object and viewer further, I created the next two stories, Daydream and Meditation. Like Mirror Mirror, they relay my reactions to visual objects, paintings in both cases. Now, though, the stories feature the object itself.
When you enter a storyteller's mind you find an abundance of curiosity and a desire to replace what is with what is possible.
Empathy, says writer Rebecca Solnit, is "then a way of traveling from here to there."
"What is it like," she asks by way of demonstration, "to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you have only read about, or the one next to you?"
What is it like, I continued on, to be the woman in the painting whose draped body hints at seduction
but whose half averted and blank face suggests she has gone someplace else,
a place I can only imagine, a memory or a daydream, where she leaves behind, if only for a few moments, the weight of the day to day?
Wanting to know, I went to meet her there.
The three stories were exhibited without my narrative attached. Sequenced on the wall, I invited the viewer to look and possiibly write their own stories in response.
We are all storytellers waiting for a prompt.
I met a man who painted mythologies and set them free. I studied his method, the way he painted classical scenes or figures with meticulous attention to detail. Then using broad brush strokes, he destroyed that historical likeness and created a blank canvas for his reimagination. The new image, a palimpsest looser in color and form, made only faint references to the original as though born from what lay beneath but reduced to its essence.
I saw it as an invitation for renewal, to open the heart and cleanse the soul.
A meditation
in the form of a dance.
Each whirl of the body a chance to set free the stories I have outgrown.
Each sway of the hips a chance to reimagine my true self.
When the music of breath and heartbeat slowed, I recognized the calm as both arrival and departure,
and knew that tomorrow I would begin the dance all over again.
