Artist Statements
LEFT BEHIND & PAUSE 2002-2007
My work asks questions about how cultural perspectives dominate our experience of reality. Growing up as a girl in an Anabaptist, conservative, midwest, family - has given me a certain paradigm to which I saw the world - and still do. I grew up in a small town far enough away from our congregation that it stood out to me and others. I also struggled with deciding for myself what is truth; especially when it came to the major life questions contained within and around a church-focused family. We belonged to a congregation that made me feel (unfortunately) like an outsider; being a shy child contributed to these feelings. When I started asking big life and faith questions, I did not feel heard. As an adult I am using photography as a form of communication, a point at which to open up dialogue to my unanswered questions. I put myself in both the vantage point of active participant and observer. These images bring up pivotal moments and choices in my life. Even though these stories are personal, they are universal.
The title LEFT BEHIND refers to those lives that are not part of the rapture. Also, it touches on the remnants that provide evidence of a life after someone passes. I began photographing my family as a graduate student at Yale. The bulk of these images were made between 2002-2005.
I am attracted to the already existing pristine, saccharine pastel interiors of the upper-middle-class home. I work with large format cameras and professional lighting to capture as much detail as possible in the settings as well as the details of a person’s face such as a bruise on an eyebrow. With the photographs in LEFT BEHIND I was interested in how religious values naturally become everyday routine activities. For an outsider these moments may seem extreme or odd yet from an insider’s view they feel normal. It’s not until later do I look back at what didn’t stick for me and question “why not?”.
In PAUSE I use a similar stylistic and conceptual approach in making the images. However, this time I am exploring what it means to be a daughter and examine the complex dramas that reveal themselves in relationships with the father and other male figures of significance. Many times, especially with this group of images, my inspirations come from my own life experiences. I became more interested in perspective, forcing the viewer to be a more active participant in the seemingly mundane moments that shaped my life. By recreating these events, it allows me to see myself through other people. I ask myself, “What did that event look like to someone else?” or “How was the other person affected who witnessed the event?” Most of these photographs were created in 2006. The themes I am exploring are the search for acceptance and love; asking if I’m good enough to be loved by you - just as I am - with all my perfect imperfections.
TOSKA (working title only)
“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.
Moving ahead a decade, I am a wife and a mother of two. TOSKA is a mix of older revisited images and new current state. I have also switched almost entirely to working with a digital camera using simpler lighting techniques so that I can be more mobile to capture images of my children as well as self-portraits. To me when I look at the many images in this series I am overwhelmed by a certain nostalgia within the complexity of life stages and universal pivotal moments within them. Some are brutal, some are sweet. I am interested in the points of transition that reference motherhood, childhood, girlhood, and the continuum of often confusing states between them and how they see each other. You do not see the religious overtones as my focus is on connections, no cell phones or computers, the moments of current consciousness.
ISRAEL, This Land Is My Land
I visited Israel for the first time in 2007. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with the land, with Judaism, and with the Jewish people, but I did, deeply—I felt connected to the place as if I’d returned home from a long journey. These images are more straight-forward, they are an introduction to a community that was becoming my new reality, they are a sort of falling in love and have a certain tenderness. They are not bombarded with the faults and contradictions like my images previously, because I wasn’t feeling those emotions in these experiences. This group of images are portraits of the people I became close to or who left an impact on my soul. They end with my Jewish family and my ritualistic experiences as I begin my new married Jewish life. Israel is now my second home. My photographic work taken in this country is a testament to my commitment to it. These photographs range from 2008-2018. Musings on identity and tradition, these images reflect the multiplicity of transformations inherent in the process of growing up and defining one’s self.
What We Didn’t Know Then 2008 (shot) /2018 (edit complete)
The video piece is of a young couple who are exploring the dance of flirtation and desire for one another. The style and location were inspired by the Italian film Maladolescenza by Pier Giuseppe Murgia, a very controversial coming of age film made in the 70’s. My video sits between innocence and experience. What makes my film What We Didn’t Know Then significant to me is that it was made after my well known color work about family and religion but before I began my Evidence series on domestic homicide. This short video comments on the moment when what is expected pleasure transforms quickly and unexpectedly into terror as a precursor to domestic violence. The editing of this film was done by my previous assistant, Hannah Phenicie, who worked closely with me on Evidence and then went on to film school. After several different attempts at hiring editors Hannah decided to give it a try and she really brought this video to life. Our relationship, working so closely together for a few years on emotional intense subject matter, was vital to the success of this piece.
EVIDENCE 2009
Absence is often mistaken for nothingness, non-existence,
not-thereness. It is none of those things. It is physical and
palpable, as real as anything felt with the hands and skin, with the
added sensation of longing or pain. The attached emotion is the only
difference between absence and presence, and so the un-involved are
unaware of its existence. Sometimes, rarely, we catch a glimpse of
absence through a special lens, even when we are not linked to the
emotional tie. In these pictures we are made part of the secret and
the feeling, and will see and feel the absence as surely as though we
were there when it became.
It is a privileged view, one I have often had in my career, and is to
be treated with respect.
Words by Barbara Butcher, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, NYC
15% of the proceeds from this body of work continues to be donated to WATCH
Founded in 1992, WATCH is a court monitoring and judicial policy non-profit located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. WATCH works to make the justice system more responsive to crimes of violence against women and children, focusing on greater safety for victims of violence and greater accountability for violent offenders. WATCH became part of The Advocates for Human Rights in July 2019.