AFTER ASCENSION AND DESCENT
I take the title of this portfolio, “After Ascension and Descent,” from a phrase by Pierre Joris in A Nomad Poetics in which he calls for an approach to writing that accounts for what Gilles Deleuze refers to as “rhizomatic,” allowing for varieties of discourse, idioms, syntax, even languages.
I gave the work this title because I am at a loss when it comes to speaking of knowing one’s roots. My family, with its adopted members, silence about its past, reverence for the absolute at the expense of the profane, has taught me to speak one language only. To be monolingual is to be foreshortened, and like so many Americans I know I speak a provincial, not a global, language. The advent of “wireless” living does nothing to allay this. If anything, we are almost hopelessly tethered—to each other, to the world. It’s when we forget this, when we think we are free beyond complicity, that we encounter trouble looking for meaning.
I watch as our attempt at domestic growth reaches for infinity and then think of growth in terms of what matters to me most, my ancestral family, the roots mostly hidden. I am aware of a subtle desperation in these pictures, as if I were trying to save something, to ground the dearest thing somehow to keep it.
Thinking in these terms has resulted in these images, an expression of desire for growth at the moment of inhibition, when hesitation is the gap between desiring and having.
When my grandmother's pansies grew unbidden from the ground 30 years after she had abandoned them, her kitchen garden, and her house, I knew I had to go home. She planted them in 1975, but widowed and lonely she left the farm that had defined her life. I became fascinated with how something could lay dormant for so many years to pop up out of the ground as if nothing had happened, or only a season had passed. I wanted to crawl out of the ground myself, but I found it much harder. I saw myself in her place. I began to quilt my images, to build scaffolds and ladders, amendments: tethers, anchors and coils. I found myself attaching these to the prints, demanding from the objects in the images that they stand still long enough for me to say something before they would move on.
Unbridled growth used to enjoy the stamp of authenticity and freedom, but now it's seen as a threat economically, culturally, even personally. There is always a moment of hesitation between achievement and reflection, the going forward and the holding back, and I keep returning to that moment.
BODY
One of my earliest projects as an artist was to match in diptychs the curvilinearity of botanicals and bodies. I made the images in this series a decade later, but I still feel the resonance from that first project. There are of course allusions here to statuary, icons, vines, and blooms, but the most urgent impetus in making these images was to drain them of all erotic reference. I certainly don't see the female or the male figure as warranting prudery; I only wanted to make the images about them, and not about my own desire.
METEMPSYCHOSES
Metempsychosis is the belief in the transmigration of souls, the speculation that the spirit of a living thing migrates after death into another living thing. All of these images consist of one object only, which has been manipulated--spun around, wiggled, or dropped multiple times during a single exposure, or over the course of several exposures. One negative takes anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour to make. I aim to find gesture not only in subject matter but in idea: we are stepping into the river Heraclitus wrote we step into just once, and we're looking at the others before us who have stepped into the river that is always moving. The subject of each of these images is one floral stem, but like our own bodies, it echoes the life of its ancestors in its mellifluous state of being.
The work in this series of flowers and leaves began as technical apprentice work. I established my lighting over the course of a year and stuck with it. The light, if also the proclivity for sensuous form and honest representation, remains a central touchstone for all the subsequent work I've shot.