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MFA Blog, Fall 2018: Self Portraits

The body problem: is the body the Self? Or is it the container of the self? What happens to the self as the body is subsumed? Time, which is age, which is a construct.

The self is performed- as much as gender, as much as identity. So too, the body. The way it’s dressed, decorated, presented, absented.

The question, then: How much is public? How much private? Where does my body end and space begin? Where am I located within the body and its spacetime?


All images: Self portraits, 2018

MFA Blog, Fall 2018: Good Bones

I’m thinking a lot recently about the problem of the body; its presence as solid, container of identity, its absence, its ability to be missing, as in missing person. The body from which the person is missing. The body of the person who is missed. The body, vacated, that still exists in the world- somewhere. Out of its context.

All images: photographs through found x-ray film, 2018.
Update: Some of these images will be part of Bump in the Night at Studio 659 in Whiting, IN, opening October 13, 2018.

MFA Blog, Fall 2018: Have You Seen Me?

I’ve been collecting these…Things, as they’re delivered to my home. They appear on the backs of advertising circulars, below coupons for discount pizza, power tools, hearing aids. Over the course of a year, dozens. I’ve polled my neighbors, who say that these advertising papers go immediately into the trash (“sorry, no, the recycling!”) without a second glance.

What am I doing with these Things? Building an archive, sorting for pattern. Staring at them, quite a bit. I’m interested in the way the images have gotten smaller over the past few weeks, taking up even less space near the address line, leaving more unoccupied white space on the page. The way that some images, some people, repeat. Their power to unsettle, when you really think about them- that these are images of real people, who no longer occupy their homes spaces, their accustomed contexts. The primacy of sight in the question: Have you seen me?

There are clear patterns, too, in whose images are repeated, whose images are smaller than others, which subjects are afforded age-progression sketches. These signal that some missing bodies, some missing persons, are more important, more valuable- more missing. More missed.