Tulip Week, No. 7.
Category: Uncategorized
Multiplicity.
I made this digital multiple exposure from my photographs of seated ventriloquist dummies designed by Laurie Simmons on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Simmons fabricated six identical dummies but dressed them in different attire in a sculpture series titled Clothes Make the Man (1991). Her work explores the tension between urges to express individual identity while simultaneously conforming to social norms of behavior and appearance.
When I shoot others’ work in museums I try to avoid shooting pieces in toto. The museum’s curators have better photographic and lighting equipment, and a postcard from the museum gift shop is bound to be superior to any shot I could take. Instead I like to focus on details: the expressiveness of a portrait subject’s hands, the juxtaposition of a painting’s edge with its frame, or the interplay of a sculpture’s bulk with the shadow it casts on its plinth or walls. I want to interpret, or possibly reinterpret and amplify what I see.
With Simmons’s piece I was struck by the bland uniformity of the dummies, despite their differences in dress, and wanted to re-imagine them fragmented and splintered and not quite put back together.
Tulip Week: At Veldheer Tulip Farm, Holland, Michigan.
Please click any photo in the set for enlarged views.
Tulip Week, No. 6.
Tulip Week, No. 5.
Tulip Week, No. 4.
Tulip Week, No. 3.
Tulip Week, No. 2.
Tulip Week, No. 1.
All of the photos in this series were taken at the annual tulip festival in Holland, Michigan, and at Veldheer Tulip Farm.
Willow world.
Dithyramb 