Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Photography; Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures

Project Advisor 1

Karen Raizen

Project Advisor 2

Lucas Blalock

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Translation for me, is much like the process of making an image. Both are heavily involved in the dream-logic, forming networks of meaning from chaos; things become entangled at a distance, depending on one another to construct their own significance. The process of flattening states of things in the world into the shallow plane of a picture and the distortion necessary to bring a text from one language to another are close in form. My practice of making images, however, heightens the oneiric qualities inherent to both the acts of translation and creation. Through the use of digital generative functions, I heighten the ambiguity and fluidity of the content of the image. These generative functions exist as the bridge between written text and the image, ideas central to both Pasolini and Flusser. For Pasolini, the power of the written word, linsign as he called it, was that it was a network of symbols that form relatively stable meanings; they have limitations to their interpretation, and their meanings aren’t necessarily particular to an author. For Pasolini, the image must be pulled from chaos, shaped into a definite symbol, and assigned meaning by a director. He believed the writer had it easy, as far as finding symbolism and communicating a narrative, but the image was where the most pure poetry could be found. Images are the realm of dreams and memory, their meaning shifts contextually, they cannot be limited in the same way as words, written down in a finite dictionary. Similarly, for Flusser, the image is a surface, upon which sits a rhizome of ambiguous things that produce meaning by being seen, not in any strict direction, but in the mind of the viewer. Text has a strict direction in which it can be interpreted, it is formed of the atomic bits of images blasted apart and given single meanings, arranged in line upon line upon line. Generated images are in some sense texts ambivalent towards their duty as a text. One frequently fails to read them, yet they hold no inherent meaning as images. On their own, they are incapable of achieving the magic significance built into the image, thus they fail to be properly seen.

These failures are what I am most interested in. As an artist, the confusion and simultaneous meaning that these images produce for me is incredible, something I have not seen done by other means as effectively. By turning the generative apparatus on myself, I can reflect the dream state of things as they appear to me, make self portraits of myself as I am not, wear impossible faces, be a person who doesn’t exist. I can adorn myself in the pearls of a woman who never was. When I was young, I heard something which scared me very much: that the human mind couldn’t invent a face, that the faces I saw in my dreams I had seen before. Maybe this isn’t true, but I don’t know why it scares me. In my dreams the mirror shows me shifting features, it becomes a windowpane, transparent not reflective. Outside there is a blue green field and a gray wooden fence. In the mirror my hair won’t stay still, it keeps becoming the leaves on the poplar tree. I can’t make myself stay the way I am, I want to be a human but I can never focus hard enough. The images my mind conjures for me in sleep are weak and thin; transient. The visual is always so watered down.

I am interspersed with images of flowers in warped vases, plants that exist but aren’t real, tables that were never there. My flowers are plucked from the natural world, and arranged, kept safe in the vase, contained. The body and the flower are one. The dream-narrative follows the bodily transformation and dissatisfaction, quasi religious epiphany, ending on the permeation of my own form by nature, ascending the finality of the human body and becoming subsumed by the shifting ecology which surrounds me, stalking. Its embrace is complete and I welcome it. Only now can I rest.

This installation is only complete with my presence. I am the watcher and the watched, each is subject and object. I act upon myself, seeing and interpreting who I am. Doing so, I put my thumb on the scales, and the answers will change again. Every image is active, there are no ‘still lives’ here.

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