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I begin with everyday objects such as a paint roller—or ordinary activities such as frosting a cake—taking them one step toward the quirky, wondrous or extravagant and one step away from our expectations of “normalcy.” I see my art practice as a laboratory where I collect, organize, and experiment with whatever attracts me: my fascination—and obsession—runs from the lowly dish-soap bottle shaped like an elegant dress, pleats and all, to the fuzzy, round auto buffer made with real sheepskin that almost looks as if it belongs on a vanity, to the iconic Sears portrait studio, an ultimate arbiter of the ordinary.
My work is primarily performance and installation based yet often the performance work results in a photograph and objects from the installations evolve into individual sculptures. Performances include flooding my kitchen with dish soap; installations include a re-creation of my personal version of a Cabinet of Curiosities; and sculptures include paint rollers that appear to be spawning. Although I have shown in galleries, I especially enjoy installing work in ambiguous spaces such as storefronts or public restrooms (as interventions). In these cases, I hope to leave the viewer uncertain if my work is art or some interesting occurrence.
I am ultimately concerned with the mundane’s potential to be marvelous and how obsession, which opens up cracks that we don’t want to know about, can inform us of what is normal—and our potential to run amok of that normalcy.
Nothing says family more than what I’ve always called the Sear’s portrait. I’m thinking of the saturated color photos with hyper-real backdrops—ranges of mottled slate, periwinkle sky, and various snowy Christmas motifs. These are template studio scenarios, with permanent photo lights, with tableaus set up in shopping mall courts at key seasonal moments. In these temporary grottos, photographers manage to coax sparkling smiles from all but the dourest subjects. Such photos are the product of a service industry targeted to individuals, couples, and groups with an investment in the notion of familial relationships. (And who doesn’t?) The resulting photographs are intended to share—as missives or holiday cards that convey cheer and belonging for so many culturally sanctioned occasions. The images offer constructed proof of existence and relationships. The fact that glossy, hard copy prints of such pictures endure in the age of Flickr and iPhoto attests to some sort of inherent psychological function of a highly codified (and commercialized) form of portraiture.
Carolyn Mason and Susannah Slocum have seized the form to explore the emphatically female conditions noted in the title of their photo series, Maternity and Matrimony. In the images, each artist appears with hired models—Slocum with children, Mason with men—who could be spawn (biological or adopted) or spouses. What functions so well here is how seamlessly the subjects slip into their roles. While this could so easily seem cynical, both the artists and their co-stars seem utterly believable as more intimately linked souls. And at the same time, they seem as generic as the example images of people on wedding days or Hawaiian vacations slipped into prefab mantlepiece photo frames. Much of this has to do with format—the photographs were primarily shot by Olin Mills, which operates studios in K-Marts across the land—which has been honed to sleek perfection to convey a sense of interpersonal intimacy. There is a photographic tradition of artists appearing and enacting roles in their work— Cindy Sherman, of course, Nikki S. Lee, Laurel Nakadate, and most recently, Kelli Connell come to mind—and its rich but difficult territory to successfully traverse. Mason and Slocum manage to imbue their pictures with life, longing, and a touch of mania. In other words, they’re part of the family.
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