Tag: interpretation

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. 

Antelope Heart

I’m posting a full-color version of a photo I previously posted in monochrome, because I’m excited by something I’ve just learned about it, and other petroglyphs at the V-Bar-V Ranch Heritage Site in the Coconino National Forest, Arizona.

I had assumed that the deep indentation in this and other glyphs at V-Bar-V were a product of vandalism. Scholars actually believe that these secondary marks, called cupules, were made by later Ancestral Puebloan visitors to the rock panels, who hoped to obtain power or spiritual virtue from the sacred images. The cupules are only seen on animal or human figures, and are typically excised near a vital area on the figure, usually corresponding to the placement of the heart. In context, what I had assumed was needless modern defacement is actually an expression of faith in the spiritual power that ancient people attributed to these images. 

Antelope Heart

I’m posting a full-color version of a photo I previously posted in monochrome, because I’m excited by something I’ve just learned about it, and other petroglyphs at the V-Bar-V Ranch Heritage Site in the Coconino National Forest, Arizona.

I had assumed that the deep indentation in this and other glyphs at V-Bar-V were a product of vandalism. Scholars actually believe that these secondary marks, called cupules, were made by later Ancestral Puebloan visitors to the rock panels, who hoped to obtain power or spiritual virtue from the sacred images. The cupules are only seen on animal or human figures, and are typically excised near a vital area on the figure, usually corresponding to the placement of the heart. In context, what I had assumed was needless modern defacement is actually an expression of faith in the spiritual power that ancient people attributed to these images.