Tag: Illinois

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. 

Detail of Water Falls from my Breast to the Sky, a site-specific installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago by Ernesto Neto, 2017. The work is made of cotton voile crochet, cotton knit fabric, cotton rope, stones, stockings, lavender, wood, polyurethane foam, and painted bowls, and is suspended in a stairwell through three museum floors.  

Detail shots of Suar a Camisa (Working Up a Sweat) by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, 2014. The installation comprises a collection of 120 shirts negotiated with workers that are hung on wooden supports. At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. 

From the exhibit didactic panel: “This grouping of worn t-shirts resembles a public assembly, a protest, or a crowd of workers. To make this installation, Andrade approached male laborers working in the streets and fields of Brazil’s Nordeste and asked them to exchange shirts on the spot; a public and subtly homoerotic invitation. … Here, the workers are absent, but their collective presence is felt nevertheless; the unwashed shirts retain the stains and smells of their original owners’ bodies.”