The Origins of Photophobia (The Grotto)
2024
16”x20” gelatin silver prints made on archival paper from 1982
The Animal
Horse (Elijah’s Back) - plaster, natural and synthetic hair, handmade rose petal beads, silver nitrate “skin”
The cave is the antechamber to the underworld, acting as an ancient and mythical space that demolishes the thin connective tissue dividing this world from the supernatural world. The experience of being in a cave is an allegory for moments in which we allow ourselves to enter a subterranean (or subconscious) space to intentionally confront massive feelings like grief, desire, pain, and sublimity. My work feeds on the urge to represent the moments of emergent belief that occur when one finds themselves deep underground, whether physically or metaphorically, especially regarding how we might be able to access these meaningful impulses in the everyday.
Working in the darkroom is an emulation of being inside a cave: it is dark, wet, reddened, erupting with tactile and auditory sensations, and tends to produce some kind of holy imagery. Much of my work is produced by printing on expired silver gelatin paper from the 1980’s. This paper produces a solarized (or x-ray) effect due to its age; the paper has been scarred by light over the course of its lifetime, making the imagery that etches into it reflect the dim conditions of the underworld. My practice also includes life-casted sculptures that are finished with a silver nitrate emulsion “skin” - shells of bodies that represent what we shed as we process deep moments of grief, that in turn are photographed to create new photographic artifacts. I consider different mythic entrances into the underworld in my pieces, including what my Russian culture believes: that the entrance to the underworld is deep in the forest, behind Baba Yaga’s hut. My recent work focuses on the depths of the forest as another location to access confrontations of bigness and grief, and how they contort the body.
This is what exploration of the deep does, this is what caves and forests and stories do: they allow boundaries to blur, dissolve, and create potentials for magic to enter a subject, rendering the body an actual physical carrier of truth and depth. They sever the logical connection between time, space, and transcendence. Using the motif of the cave and its liminal spaces, I aim to create worlds of hybrid creatures that don’t exist fully in the natural or supernatural worlds: possessed bodies that are affected heavily by the madness of the grotto and inhabited by some kind of magic that only exists between worlds. The hints of the underworld and of our unconscious that seep into the domestic realm show that the body, the spirit, our memory, and identity are not fixed.
Working in the darkroom is an emulation of being inside a cave: it is dark, wet, reddened, erupting with tactile and auditory sensations, and tends to produce some kind of holy imagery. Much of my work is produced by printing on expired silver gelatin paper from the 1980’s. This paper produces a solarized (or x-ray) effect due to its age; the paper has been scarred by light over the course of its lifetime, making the imagery that etches into it reflect the dim conditions of the underworld. My practice also includes life-casted sculptures that are finished with a silver nitrate emulsion “skin” - shells of bodies that represent what we shed as we process deep moments of grief, that in turn are photographed to create new photographic artifacts. I consider different mythic entrances into the underworld in my pieces, including what my Russian culture believes: that the entrance to the underworld is deep in the forest, behind Baba Yaga’s hut. My recent work focuses on the depths of the forest as another location to access confrontations of bigness and grief, and how they contort the body.
This is what exploration of the deep does, this is what caves and forests and stories do: they allow boundaries to blur, dissolve, and create potentials for magic to enter a subject, rendering the body an actual physical carrier of truth and depth. They sever the logical connection between time, space, and transcendence. Using the motif of the cave and its liminal spaces, I aim to create worlds of hybrid creatures that don’t exist fully in the natural or supernatural worlds: possessed bodies that are affected heavily by the madness of the grotto and inhabited by some kind of magic that only exists between worlds. The hints of the underworld and of our unconscious that seep into the domestic realm show that the body, the spirit, our memory, and identity are not fixed.