down on all four

I make self-portraits. Through performing for the camera, I take advantage of photography’s inherent deception, constructing scenes that mimic the real while remaining slightly adjacent to my life.

I make self-portraits. Through performing for the camera, I take advantage of photography’s inherent deception, constructing scenes that mimic the real while remaining slightly adjacent to my life. These images borrow the gestures of film and everyday imagery that have ultimately shaped my desires and longings for what intimacy looks like. I am interested in the space just beside myself. A tree that mirrors the curve of a body I once saw in a movie and never stopped thinking about. Matching Christmas sweaters printed on heavy cardstock and delivered to my mailbox. The imagined caress of someone I am not certain exists, but whose presence feels specific and scented.

In my recent work I am six months pregnant, or rather the body I wear and perform is six months pregnant. The belly feels cold and sticky against my waist, like a hug I am not yet used to. Many misunderstandings have come up since sharing my work online, which in hindsight I should have expected. I repeat poses associated with pregnant women at rest, not to express a desire to reproduce, but as a strategy to inhabit a character who is not lonely. To be someone whose body bears proof of touch, and the promise of not being alone, if not now then soon.

My fascination with women on film is often plagued by how women’s bodies are consumed as narrative material: wives photographed into permanence, dead mom montages, girls fridged to propel male protagonists. From this position, I construct my images. Though if asked what my work is about, I would say it is about loneliness. About the desire for connection, the desire to care. I mimic what I see in order to make images that existed in another life, just one step to the side of my own.