Bath of Light

These works are a sketch, a collective diary, a visual stream of consciousness. Like writing and writing and writing with no end in sight and only afterwards stopping to see what words make sense, what is unreadable. 

There are two scales being balanced. The steadiness of light and the unsteadiness of myself. And, in simpler terms, exterior vs. interior. The act of hiding oneself while wanting to be seen. The act of stripping oneself bare, of letting a space play witness, all in a bath of light. 

Shooting them is a way to stop time. To be standing in my studio, and feel the urge to not be in my own head for a moment. So I pause, and I grab the instant camera. I always shoot the frame of the window first. The light blasts it’s pure white onto the film, and before I’ve even raised the camera to my own face or body I’ve already unwittingly chosen which parts of myself I will allow to be seen. The light erases parts of me. Until the frame finishes developing I never know exactly how much of me will show, exactly which parts of me will be hidden. 

In this way, the light is a physical material. (As it always is with photographs, but never so obviously as with multiple exposures.) Light, a material, the window an instrument: a frame for the light to flood through. The photographs fold in and over on themselves and though the work is two dimensional, I always find photography to be some kind of sculpture, a parallel universe you only enter from the front. There are no questions to answer here, I’m only wanting to be seen. These are two photographs placed on top of each other, overlapping and merging into one new universe.