What is a Photograph? Submission
I am submitting individual works from several different recent series. This page contains the complete statements for each image/project.
Self Portrait as Jimmy, 2018
Experimental photography with analog and digital glitch. 11" x 14" aluminum panel.
Series: The Three of us are Dying (artist statement below image).
Series: The Three of us are Dying (artist statement below image).
Self Portrait as Jimmy, 2018 – from The Three of us are Dying (series)
The Three of us are Dying uses experimental photography to investigate the fragility of self as it encounters media—especially the haunted language of conflating self with a fictional “other.”
Our memories are highly fictionalized. We endlessly spin internal self-stories; the star of our own biopic. Film and television are part of these memories and it’s no surprise we often find ourselves reflected in media narratives. We look at media-faces and those faces seem to look back.
The Three of us are Dying investigates my own connection to media avatars—figures that resonate with me, reflect me, alternately embrace and deny me. I excavate and mutate our shared body-image, allowing glitch to suggest a state of falling apart (both theirs and mine), Together, we are unraveling, fading—a dance of the projection and the projected, the possessor and the possessed, the remembered and the forgotten.
The Three of us are Dying uses experimental photography to investigate the fragility of self as it encounters media—especially the haunted language of conflating self with a fictional “other.”
Our memories are highly fictionalized. We endlessly spin internal self-stories; the star of our own biopic. Film and television are part of these memories and it’s no surprise we often find ourselves reflected in media narratives. We look at media-faces and those faces seem to look back.
The Three of us are Dying investigates my own connection to media avatars—figures that resonate with me, reflect me, alternately embrace and deny me. I excavate and mutate our shared body-image, allowing glitch to suggest a state of falling apart (both theirs and mine), Together, we are unraveling, fading—a dance of the projection and the projected, the possessor and the possessed, the remembered and the forgotten.
Sincerely Yours, Buck Jones, 2018
Experimental photography with analog and digital glitch. Diptych. Two options are ready to hang: 1. 8" x 10" (each panel size) metallic paper on boards 2. 11" x 14" (each panel size) on metallic paper, mounted directly on wall.
Series: Lost (Body)
Series: Lost (Body)
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Sincerely Yours, Buck Jones, 2018 – from Lost (Body) (series)
Western film star Buck Jones died in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Nightclub Fire helping others escape the inferno. Most of his films were also lost to fire. Of the hundreds he made from 1918-1942, the majority were destroyed in a series of film archive and studio blazes. His life, his life’s work—consumed, erased, and eroded by fire and its curious parallel to failing personal and collective memory.
All that’s left to remember the tragedy in Boston is a vague plaque in a parking lot marking 492 lost lives. All that’s left of Buck’s work are a few random films, themselves rapidly failing. Once the last reels are gone, the last digital transfers rendered obsolete, what residue will remain? Do we arrogantly (and foolishly) believe media can hold on forever? How tenuously do we hold lives, moments and remains?
Lost (Body) examines traces of Buck’s lost films to investigate the fallibility of media, the fragility of living memory and our inevitable march toward oblivion. Publicity stills and posters serve as artifacts of Buck’s lost moments, themselves subjected to experimental re-photography and glitch. Slick surfaces become sensitive, raw and partially destroyed, reminding us that even these visual artifacts are ultimately incapable of holding on.
Western film star Buck Jones died in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Nightclub Fire helping others escape the inferno. Most of his films were also lost to fire. Of the hundreds he made from 1918-1942, the majority were destroyed in a series of film archive and studio blazes. His life, his life’s work—consumed, erased, and eroded by fire and its curious parallel to failing personal and collective memory.
All that’s left to remember the tragedy in Boston is a vague plaque in a parking lot marking 492 lost lives. All that’s left of Buck’s work are a few random films, themselves rapidly failing. Once the last reels are gone, the last digital transfers rendered obsolete, what residue will remain? Do we arrogantly (and foolishly) believe media can hold on forever? How tenuously do we hold lives, moments and remains?
Lost (Body) examines traces of Buck’s lost films to investigate the fallibility of media, the fragility of living memory and our inevitable march toward oblivion. Publicity stills and posters serve as artifacts of Buck’s lost moments, themselves subjected to experimental re-photography and glitch. Slick surfaces become sensitive, raw and partially destroyed, reminding us that even these visual artifacts are ultimately incapable of holding on.
The Storm is Broken (dead man standing), 2018
Experimental photography with analog and digital glitch. 11" x 14" metallic paper, mounted directly on wall.
Series: Unraveling (statement below image).
Series: Unraveling (statement below image).
Unraveling is a multimedia installation that investigates the language of falling apart and its relationship to memory and ruin.
In the terrain of the almost-gained, our best-laid plans occupy a trauma space laced with memory-failure, the fragility of holding together, and the corrosive self-narratives we use to maintain reality.
Creating this work was a daily process, an intense, multi-part ritual of image capture and destruction:
I produced 8,413 experimental photographs over the course of 31 days. Damaged 'photos' spoke to the quiet, dangerous process of falling apart, of losing yourself (in spite of yourself)–that great catastrophe of moments. Ruin and memory occupied the same terrain. Only 9 days in, I had more than 1,000 iterations—fragile, burning pinpoints. And I noticed events in the story planted firmly on real calendar days. On New Year’s, George and Lennie took the bus to Soledad. By the 6th, they’d started bucking barley, menaced by over boss Curley. On the 13th, George, Lennie and Candy dreamed of a future kingdom. On the 17th, Lennie beat cruel Curley to a pulp; a luscious point of no return. Lennie strangled Mae on my 44th birthday, January 22, the end of everything. By the 24th, all hope was lost. By the 29th, George had shot Lennie dead.
Each piece was an individual breath, atomized key frames, event horizons--white-hot points of no return.
In the terrain of the almost-gained, our best-laid plans occupy a trauma space laced with memory-failure, the fragility of holding together, and the corrosive self-narratives we use to maintain reality.
Creating this work was a daily process, an intense, multi-part ritual of image capture and destruction:
- In the mornings, I sampled raw material from a pile of vintage publicity stills from the original Of Mice and Men (1939) film. At noon, I read a section of the corresponding John Steinbeck text. At night, I excavated an unstable TV playback of the film (4 minutes per day, so the film would unfold slowly over 31 days). The process was unrelenting, no deviation allowed—forcing me to live inside the story’s grand narrative of disintegration and failure.
- To make the morning images, I used a common camera—an old iPhone or Kindle, combined with lamps, light strings and plastic wrap, to sample the surface of the silver gelatin prints. Images were manipulated manually and digitally.
- To make the evening images, I sat in front of the TV with the same camera, paired with lamps and tinfoil—and captured digital “monotypes” from the screen. The images were hacked with Processing, glitch and other techniques, but were also folded into the morning images. Several images from the day before were also brought forward and mixed into the current day’s work. It was a process of real-time manipulation combined with post-production hacking.
I produced 8,413 experimental photographs over the course of 31 days. Damaged 'photos' spoke to the quiet, dangerous process of falling apart, of losing yourself (in spite of yourself)–that great catastrophe of moments. Ruin and memory occupied the same terrain. Only 9 days in, I had more than 1,000 iterations—fragile, burning pinpoints. And I noticed events in the story planted firmly on real calendar days. On New Year’s, George and Lennie took the bus to Soledad. By the 6th, they’d started bucking barley, menaced by over boss Curley. On the 13th, George, Lennie and Candy dreamed of a future kingdom. On the 17th, Lennie beat cruel Curley to a pulp; a luscious point of no return. Lennie strangled Mae on my 44th birthday, January 22, the end of everything. By the 24th, all hope was lost. By the 29th, George had shot Lennie dead.
Each piece was an individual breath, atomized key frames, event horizons--white-hot points of no return.
I Cannot Rise Where I Have Fallen (this melting sadness of eyes and lips), 2018
Experimental photography with analog and digital glitch. 8" x 10" metallic paper. Framed or mounted directly on wall--your choice.
Series: Channeling (artist statement below image).
Series: Channeling (artist statement below image).
Channeling – Televisual Memory and Media Séance is a multimedia installation that combines still images, video, and interactive elements to address the nature of television as both media and medium, capable of "summoning" the dead in perpetuity.
Television is a possessive specter. It permeates our memories, our engagement with the world—affecting our understanding of self and purpose. To revisit older media on television is to enter the territory of memory itself, where we face fading moments that remain cannibalized in a cycle of broadcast (and recollection)—consumed and regurgitated. Watching not only conjures characters and their fictional curses, it summons our own inability to escape media possession.
Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, Adams mines digital “monotypes” from vintage horror films rebroadcast on TV, subjecting them to analog and digital glitch. Focused on the screen presence of Lon Chaney Jr., a figure she associates with her own dislocated childhood, Adams uses an obsessive system of “summoning” and extracting, creating glitches that articulate the imperfection of memory and the vampirism of a media-cursed self. The resulting moments are haunting and unstable, featuring a receding “hero” who is undermined, uncertain and media-bitten.
In essence, television supersedes mortality. “Dead” moments are channeled with a click, yet without interaction, media is entombed. We connect its points. We invite its permeation, its infection. We are both necromancer and created, and these wild borderlands of self-and-culture are the stuff of séance, a trance suspended between manifestation and ending, between the archive and the living.
Television is a possessive specter. It permeates our memories, our engagement with the world—affecting our understanding of self and purpose. To revisit older media on television is to enter the territory of memory itself, where we face fading moments that remain cannibalized in a cycle of broadcast (and recollection)—consumed and regurgitated. Watching not only conjures characters and their fictional curses, it summons our own inability to escape media possession.
Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, Adams mines digital “monotypes” from vintage horror films rebroadcast on TV, subjecting them to analog and digital glitch. Focused on the screen presence of Lon Chaney Jr., a figure she associates with her own dislocated childhood, Adams uses an obsessive system of “summoning” and extracting, creating glitches that articulate the imperfection of memory and the vampirism of a media-cursed self. The resulting moments are haunting and unstable, featuring a receding “hero” who is undermined, uncertain and media-bitten.
In essence, television supersedes mortality. “Dead” moments are channeled with a click, yet without interaction, media is entombed. We connect its points. We invite its permeation, its infection. We are both necromancer and created, and these wild borderlands of self-and-culture are the stuff of séance, a trance suspended between manifestation and ending, between the archive and the living.
Lovely Florida Coast II, 2017
Experimental photography with analog and digital glitch. View-Master with reel.
Series: In this Twilight Sleep (artist statement below both View-Master submissions).
Series: In this Twilight Sleep (artist statement below both View-Master submissions).
Lovely Mojave II, 2017
Experimental photography with analog and digital glitch. View-Master with reel.
As our living world collapses into infirmity, dying slowly, dying suddenly—we are surrounded by a seemingly endless cycle of loss most are powerless to mourn. In our paralysis, we turn to media for escape—but that route is haunted. Pervasive media, like television, is an accidental eyewitness, a record of our imprint on the planet. It’s a virtual database of environments ‘caught’ tangentially on tape; an ‘archive’ of our former (changing) landscape exists within the very media we use for avoidance.
Yet, the environment is rarely the subject of TV programming. The land is transient, offhandedly preserved—relegated to the background of a consumable program, itself destined for obscurity. Thus excavating the environment from the backdrop of Cold War television reinforces both the fleeting, secondary representation of landscape, and the notion of environment as ‘accessory’ to human story. This ‘accessorizing’ is part of our misery.
In this Twilight Sleep is a series of linked, looping ‘episodes’ that capture this fading fingerprint, as if recalling the image in perpetuity can somehow mourn and undo human-induced calamity. Using experimental photography and glitch to suggest the partially preserved and the mostly lost, I emphasize the distance between actual loss and our inability to process (or avoid) it. Videos are composed of reanimated, mutated stills extracted from television with a cell phone. This reanimation appropriates life, after the landscape has died. The corresponding Lovely… View-Master set expands this melancholic TV block by serving as memento mori. Suggesting old View-Master reels of postcard locations, my reels are souvenirs of a lost landscape; ruin and absence the only remaining commodity. Together, they are lamentations; a virtual tourism of a seemingly unstoppable end.
Yet, the environment is rarely the subject of TV programming. The land is transient, offhandedly preserved—relegated to the background of a consumable program, itself destined for obscurity. Thus excavating the environment from the backdrop of Cold War television reinforces both the fleeting, secondary representation of landscape, and the notion of environment as ‘accessory’ to human story. This ‘accessorizing’ is part of our misery.
In this Twilight Sleep is a series of linked, looping ‘episodes’ that capture this fading fingerprint, as if recalling the image in perpetuity can somehow mourn and undo human-induced calamity. Using experimental photography and glitch to suggest the partially preserved and the mostly lost, I emphasize the distance between actual loss and our inability to process (or avoid) it. Videos are composed of reanimated, mutated stills extracted from television with a cell phone. This reanimation appropriates life, after the landscape has died. The corresponding Lovely… View-Master set expands this melancholic TV block by serving as memento mori. Suggesting old View-Master reels of postcard locations, my reels are souvenirs of a lost landscape; ruin and absence the only remaining commodity. Together, they are lamentations; a virtual tourism of a seemingly unstoppable end.