Spilling out of a Pandora’s box, previously concealed truths reveal themselves. A hand, a living experience and the intuition it contains, is full of signification. This can be translated in a multiplicity of paradoxical ways.
Beauty is a socioeconomic and political construction. How we depict women in art opens up a dialogue and an opportunity to affect our inter-relationships. We are not alone in deriving pleasure from the spectacle. Manet’s Olympia, and the official ideology she implies, returns our gaze.
Voice Box is a reminder of the fertile, nurturing potential of women’s words and the pain that women endure in trying to speak those messages. It contains powdered milk and an egg licked by tongues of flame and so marked with soot.
materials: wood, powdered milk, soot, paint, paper.
If I shut the lid tight, can anyone know for sure what it is in the box? The outside of the box is decorated attractively as a person intentionally embellishes their appearance to conceal their inner life. The ancient Vietnamese had a saying, “It is easy to know a man from his appearance, but difficult to recognize his thinking.”
My work is a personal investigation which began as an attempt to see the body through the photographic medium in ways which are impossible with the naked eye.
I realize that we view images of the body very differently when they are life size or larger. Other objects do not hold such power and are always subject to interpretation of space when confronted by differences in size. The body, although conforming to the same rules of perspective, also holds another set of rules. The body is the common denominator of all the viewers, it is something to relate with on the most personal and intimate basis.
When working in photography it is important to remember that, unfortunately, photography is the choice medium of pornographers. It is a transparent medium; one that is taken of evidence of objective truth with little subjective interdiction. Any picture of a body is not necessarily thought of as a picture of a body, but as a body. We see through the portal of the pictures medium and look at the picture as evidence of truth…or of the body itself. A painting of a body has a different emotional charge than a photograph of the same body. Where a painting of the body would be considered sensual, a photograph of the same body is considered pornographic.
I am dealing with the total involvement of the figure and the role and relationship of the artist and viewer.
When time is short; the need to understand what is important becomes imperative.
I learn to speak my truth, my voice having been stifled by a paralysis of childhood origins.
A twinkle of infinity
is whistling through the universe
carrying a secret.
When the secret mirror first opened, she was obliged to recognize the elaborate and multiform disguises behind which oneness lies.
Out of the darkness, the void, the night, we are reaching for truth, for life, the light.
What would happen if one women told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
-Muriel Rukeyser
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