| Traditional photographs
are seen as an encapsulation of an instant, as reality as we experience
it. My work functions in an essentially different way: as symbols
in a dialogue.
Hands and flowers are
historical symbols of the body - severed and abstracted icons of
sex and death. The hands, bloated and dismembered from their arms,
evoke mental pictures of corpses in the throws of rigor mortis,
or the latex gloves of an autopsy room. The pictures are representations
of symbols - a device that opens an ironic distance between the
viewer and the photograph large enough for the viewer to gaze back
at himself.
The flower looms large
in our collective mind as the synonym of sexual love. The severed
flower is given to the lover as sign of affection - its potency
contained in the cut - the sacrifice of the beautiful to the object
of desire. The pressed flower is both the vestige of memory and
the scientist's specimen, the paradox of these photographs. Sterile
and delicate, isolated from an environment, they evoke the objective
exclusivity of scientific examination, but invert the focus: they
are self-reflexive examinations.
|
