| The other day I thought I saw a woman step on a pile of baby birds, but it turned out to be shredded cardboard. |  |
Daniel Gordon
The other day I thought I saw a woman step on a pile of baby birds, but it turned out to be shredded cardboard. Often I see people that I think I know who turn out to be strangers, and sometimes I don’t recognize my friends.
The feeling I am attempting to sustain in my work is the one felt in such a moment of perception. I’m interested in the feeling of physical vulnerability, and the uncanny sensation that occurs when things are not what they initially appear to be.
I manifest this work alone in my studio, but I view it as a peculiar collaboration between myself, and what I’ve chosen as my material: images found on the Internet that I print and construct into a three-dimensional tableau, that is ultimately photographed. This process presents limitations as well as unexpected direction. In this way I don’t anticipate a picture’s meaning or its formal qualities before I begin to make it. I let the criteria of the process guide the subject matter, discovering what the work is about as it comes to life.
In this group of pictures titled Portrait Studio, I am playing with the trope of an artist and his muse. The pictures incorporate interpretations of classic artist/muse relationships in literature, life, and history, from Dr. Frankenstein’s obsession with his monster, to the inspiration Alfred Stieglitz found through Georgia O’Keefe. The “mash-up” poem below is a splicing of two different texts: a quote by Stieglitz about O’Keefe and an excerpt from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein—a different font represents each. I have deconstructed and assembled these words in much the same way I create my pictures. Like Doctor Frankenstein, I use old, found parts in order to create a new and whole original.
“In fact I don’t believe there ever has been anything like her—Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. Mind and feeling very clear—a mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. Spontaneous and uncannily beautiful—I had gazed on her while unfinished; she was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. Absolutely living every pulse beat.”
Through my work in the studio I have attempted to bring to life these cobbled-together images of body parts using the transformative potential of photography, with the acceptance that human form can be simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, loved and exploited.
