


—click on any image to enlarge—
My photographic work utilizes found language and imagery. As an undergraduate I studied Anthropology and I look at my source materials, books, blackboards, card catalogues, player piano rolls, sewing patterns etc. as potent artifacts that can yield poetic information reflecting the circulation and dissemination of information and material in our shared popular culture. I’m thinking about structures and systems and how a playful engagement can yield insights as well as generate new meanings.
Transposing the tradition of street photography, I navigate intuitively framing and partially decontextualizing my subject matter harnessing moments that suggest meanings beyond their original situations.
What interests me are the juxtapositions and sense of history derived from the words themselves even without knowing everything. I want to give you a sense of a particular environment but not in its entirety. The view is oblique and re-contextualized. In this close up immersive situation the viewer can retain a level of awareness, just enough to inform but also to allow a different visual and semantic experience to take hold. The source is familiar and recognizable but the experience is new. It is that tension between something that we recognize, that we routinely encounter and the fact that we can look at it in a different way that creates a strangeness, a difference in which exist multiple possibilities.
While respecting the constraints of a given subject, the page sequence of a book or the reference system of a library, the work suggests a visual meta-language, mixing history and humor to display the disparate, often unheard cacophony of voices present within cultural structures.
Reflecting intimate and direct encounters with familiar actions and objects – opening a card catalogue drawer, opening a book, folding a page – the viewer is reminded that meaningful visual surprise surrounds us if one pays attention.
Recent museum exhibitions include Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Face à face, frac île‐de‐france, Villetaneuse, France; Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, The New York Public Library, New York; The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lever le voile, Frac île‐de‐france, Paris; The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, The Jewish Museum, New York; Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Recent solo and two‐person exhibitions include A METHOD OF A CLOAK, Square is the Chatter, Galerie Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf; A METHOD OF A CLOAK, Klemm’s, Berlin; A Long Dress, Bureau, New York; Naked Eye Nature Morte, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, France; AAa:Quien, Erica Baum & Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, New York; The Following Information, Bureau, New York; and Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris. Selected biennials include: AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012.
Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐ Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and others.
At least
reinvent
destiny
tatters
within geological strata
toss them into
a billion
little
days
All of them
erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p.10
Pinnae segments from fertile fronds, Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis
choose
to
fall into
quantum physics
tracing the path of particles
within
this
brimming world
this
empire of paper
zeal
erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p. 470
simple leaves, Pincushion Moss, Leucobryum glaucum
orange
black
mixed and ready,
dying in the air.
a discreet
cleft.
night,
came again,
dark and distinct,
erasure, Anne Rice, Taltos, p. 120
capsules and berries, Japanese Spindle and Privet, Euonymous japonica and Ligustrum compactum
This series of erasures use the Anne Rice novel Taltos as their source text. I elected to perform these erasures using plant materials as a way of celebrating and mourning our current ecological state; the breakneck speed of climate change and globalization is easily observed by those working in horticulture and conservation. These plants represent both native plants that are threatened by habitat loss and the non-natives that are replacing them. In selecting materials for these erasures, I looked for plants that were accessible in the New England landscape during the month of October, and sought diversity of form, texture, colour, and botanical structures.
in modern America (2014)
important parts of religious experience (2014)
not even (2015)
the eternal mystery in pictures (2014)
the shadows’ touch . . . (2016)
For the last five years I’ve been making text/image sequences of poetry employing found language on the dust jackets of hardcover books. I clip the last lines of blurbs to compose poetry. These last words, so to speak, are vestiges of writing which is itself deliberately ordinary in function. We are all too aware of the deception of buying a book after reading a blurb more engaging than the volume it’s wrapped around. I’m taking up the challenge of writing as collage from such meager shards, bringing variations of color, typography, and bits of images into the process.
This collection takes its title from a famous novel, with a notable redaction. When “is” is cut out, “tender” is transformed from adjective—meaning caring, gentle, sweet—to verb: to tender is to offer, proffer, present. Night becomes currency. The collage-poems assembled here depend on just this style of phase change: excision reaping lateral transformation. The novel Tender is the Night redacts and reorganizes the experience of its muse, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. These scraps muse on roaring nights, given and profited from, pilfering mass media, art, the vault of my life and the lives of near ones, poking around the basement of theft and offer.
Notational
Very Portent
Location
Nowhere Here
You have left for tomorrow
like the rhythm of rust
reverberating through
the blinds—darting,
gasping, fleeing the day
we pressed our hearts
against the glitter
of wisdom, our being
choked on a voiceless
command—be still,
be pliant, be the words
translucent as dust.
It must be rain inside the walls. The rain of a child’s cries, a red swing against the grey sweetness of sky. A hollow to stifle, rocking in the cold front. Of ciphers discarded on the doorsteps, lips bleeding into porcelain shards to let live. Come back, come back, to the call of faceless drinkers pleading for histories, in a room of dust singed by erasure. For I will wait, I will wait to touch their voices, punctured by rain.