it isn't vanity

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a deeply held belief i adopted during childhood:

i am singular and will go through life that way.

i am trying to uproot it and it is very difficult.

scary as fuck.

the only place i feel entirely safe is within myself.

but that is a nebulous world.

mutable and full of anxious longing.

i take pictures of myself to prove that i exist.

not to prove it to you, to prove it to ME.

these shapes and angles and senses.

i take pictures of myself so that i can look and see and believe that i am

here, real,

walking and breathing along with the rest of you.

an attempt, maybe, to unhinge this belief in my own singularity;

to disrupt my distrust and make a window

in to (or out of) my own nebulous world.


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camera 1, camera 2

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partnership

i've been thinking a lot lately about diptychs and triptychs... pairs of images or a small collection of images that, though they might seem disparate, are not. and how the audience, the viewer, is very important is helping create narrative... that maybe i'm more of a guide or suggestive force than an artist who aspires to giving concrete answers. that i could set up an environment, a point A and point B, and then relinquish control; let the viewer "draw" the line between the two points:

more thinking...

i read guy debord's 'the society of the spectacle' today for the 5th or 6th time- it's one of the theory bits i always go back to... probably because i'm completely sold on most of what it says. and then i went and kept reading 'the bell jar' and i am presently 40 pages from the end. i am drinking a cup of coffee even though it's late enough in the day to make that idea a bad idea. it means i've committed myself to a night of lucid dreaming and highly fitful sleep. and... that's not really entirely bad or unfun when it's friday night anyway. all this reading, all this brain activity, all this swimming underneath the covers, all this ingestion of ideas and words and politics has got me skipping across images and ideas of my own, words of my own, values of my own, and it feels fiery and enormous and swelling and sweeping and energetic. the investigation that becomes inevitable. and more and more i'm thinking of art (or a person) as an evidence room- a collection of evidences: the books in the shelf, the baby teeth in the jewelery box, the music in the back bedroom, the underlined passages of words, the refrigerator magnets, the left over stuffed animals from childhood. all these things. the signifiers. but what do they signify? who? i'm settling on what and not who. i'm settling on an idea that the signifiers are evidence of desire. evidence of loss- the yearning, hoping, coveting, begging, wishing, and craving that create a (true?) portrait of a person's desire. i am not my cd collection and that collection can't be trusted to tell you anything substantial about who i am, what my personality is like, or what my deep values are. but if you take the cd collection and add it to the book collection and add those to my clothes, the pictures in the lip of the mirror, the trinkets on the dresser, the pictures on the wall, the towel on the bathroom floor, the shoes in the hallway, the shoes kicked off right inside the front door, the dish left unwashed, the fragrance of perfume, the stamp collection, the rosary collection, the art collection, etc etc etc... maybe a strange, shifty definition of my desires emerge... as evidenced by all my attractions. just like a flickr account or a tumbler account. a list of images that belie what the person behind the buttons wants for themselves, dreams for themselves, or at least wants you to dream of them as...

these are things i've been thinking about a lot the past couple weeks. this is how i'm thinking of my practice at present. this is why i want to keep a lot of the new work private for awhile. just a bit. just a breath. i am collecting the evidences, i suppose.

side-note: this is my 666th post on this blog. eeewwww.