Mirror, Mirror

My work pushes back against the history of photography in which male photographers used female subjects as muses, objects and form. Instead, I find power in using my body to capture moments of my own experience filled with hilarity, pathos, and beauty.

My background in ballet compels me to use my own body in carefully composed photographs, installations and videos that draw on art historical and autobiographical references. The objects in my artworks, including vegetables, fruit, chairs, mirrors, a placenta, my breasts and more, become a cast of characters with which I mine sexuality, the grotesque, and subconscious longing. My photographs reveal a body that is constantly changing, enjoying physical pleasure, and enduring the pains of motherhood and aging. My work pushes back against the history of photography in which male photographers used female subjects as muses, objects and form. Instead, I find power in using my body and the tools I have around me, to capture moments of my own authentic experience filled with hilarity, pathos, and beauty.

Inspired by the history of still life painting, my photographs destabilize and play with traditional expectations of the genre. For example, I have photographed dramatically lit groupings of rotting vegetables on black backgrounds, in homage to artists such as Spanish Baroque painter Juan Sánchez Cotán and American still-life painter Raphaelle Peale. These startling compositions of moldy fruit, reflect a fading vibrancy that will nourish new life. For example, when my son was born in 2018, I photographed myself breastfeeding him on the floor of my studio and in 2023 I photographed my placenta on the eve of my son's 5th birthday. Other artworks feature squashes and gourds that my family grows in their garden in set-ups that suggest an orgy of bodily caressing. Giant phallic zucchinis lay cradled in my lap, while the form of a butternut squash creates parallels with my own body shaped by the discipline of classical ballet.

Although I employ mirrors, doubles, and repetition in camera, I make no use of digital manipulation. I insistently reveal the tools of my process, leaving visible the clips and edges of the seamless paper used as a backdrop. The illusions created in the tableaus I arrange are captured with a straightforward honesty of method that underscore the complexity of my process. I’ve been inspired by Photo-multigraphs - they were a popular novelty in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I built an apparatus where I could change the angles of the mirrors easily while also having them large enough to fit my whole body between them. Normally two mirrors are used to create 5 subjects from one sitter, but I used it to both multiply and fragment the subjects of the pictures. I worked in this space for the last few years and also continued to make still life photographs.

For me there is little separation between my art practice and motherhood. I explored this theme more deeply in my exhibition, animal, vegetable, mineral, at The Pit in Los Angeles. This show brought up new questions about my work, my aging body, and the history of representation of women. I started to see folds of fat and stretch marks. Instead of shying away from these details, I highlighted them by photographing my skin and torso and enlarging the images to create textures for backgrounds for set-ups. The sculpture at the center of the exhibition is a metal ballet barre with a photographic quilt hung over it. The title, Torso packing blanket/quilt, barre/rack, refers to the many things the sculpture takes shape as. The sewing being the same as a packing blanket, the barre acting as a quilt rack. The image on the fabric is of my torso, indented with lines from a leotard after ballet class. These lines could be seen as scars from surgery or even giving birth. They reference motherhood as in pregnancy - vertical line develops that goes through the belly button, called Linea Negra, thought to guide the newborn baby up to the mother’s breasts.

Although I have photographed my body for years, and performed ballet in front of live audiences, I have a sudden discomfort and resistance to self-portraiture. I am just beginning to examine this shift in myself, reflective of societal biases that prizes the young and throws away the old.