Geryon’s Sacrifice
2024
silver gelatin prints on paper from 1980’s
“Every downward journey supposes two corollaries: an implicit challenge and an upward journey (anabasis). In other words, a challenge to recover (or learn) something from the underworld…and an attempt to return to one’s habitual or social world with this something. Every downward journey implies the question: will the upward journey be successful?” (Dawson 63)
The Grotto delves into Greek mythos, studying various katabasis (journeys to the underworld) throughout mythos to explore how the ascent from the underworld can contort and change a body in the contemporary domestic realm. Life-casted plaster sculptures, sometimes finished with a silver nitrate “skin,” if one squints in the metaphysical sense, become the shells of ourselves that are shed through ascent after moments of bigness, transition, + grief. This series explores creatures that don’t fully exist in the natural or supernatural worlds: possessed bodies that are affected 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. Myth is important.
My Russian culture believes that the entrance to the underworld is deep in the forest, behind Baba Yaga’s hut. All we have to do is get to the place and let our bodies contort.
Dawson, Terrance. ‘Virgil, Epicureanism, and Unseemly Behavior.’ The Descent of the Soul and the Archaic, edited by Paul Bishop, Terrance Dawson, and Leslie Gardner. Routledge, 52-72.