KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described the photograph as “a temporal hallucination; so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.” I’m increasingly interested in this mad image, truncated and isolated from time and place, extracted from its source, and fastened to a new unreality. A wonderful conflict arises when a mechanical instrument -- a “clock for seeing” -- is used to produce an abstract or ambiguous metaphor for what may have been but also was.
This body of work is comprised of characters and scenes that I feel best present a notion of dreaming. Fantasies, signifiers, and spectacle unfold at random while we sleep, or at least without respect for the context of our waking thoughts. In this way, the mad image can connect to a personal existence, to be held close, or only whispered like a secret.
* This series was exhibited as part of PhotoNOLA festival during the month of December 2012. For more information, please see the festival website here.
