series: things in a dark room
The building I live in was built sometime in the 1930’s. Part of me wonders if the basement had ever been cleaned since then. It seems that every time someone moves out, they leave a little piece of themselves behind, and over the past 90 years or so, those things seem to have piled up. I don’t spend a ton of time in the basement, only really going down there to do laundry. But why else would I go down there? It’s filthy, full of trash, it stinks; but every time I go down there I can’t help but think of all the people that had lived here, before everything was falling apart, before the cockroaches had full reign. I also think about how when I leave this place, I too will leave pieces of myself behind for someone to discover, and so that is what I’m trying to portray with these images. Different outfits paired with interesting items in a cold, dirty place underneath my bedroom. I purposely left my face out of these self-portraits, I really wanted to explore the power that just things had, there’s different emotions and personalities in each of the pictures without having to show a facial expression or say any words. And each outfit and item will mean something different to each person that sees them, and that’s the point I'm trying to make. All these different people that have lived here throughout the years, leaving behind their clothes and belongings, each with a story that I can never know and will never know, so I jut have to make one up, just as someone would have to make up a story about the yellow guy and his typewriter, or the blue guy and his candle. So I obviously took some inspiration from Cindy Sherman in terms of dressing up, feeling like you’re someone else, finding your own identity through being other people. And the artist that I took the most inspiration from in this project is Carrie Mae Weems and her kitchen table series, in that identity is found through the space, and the person’s interaction with that space. This is sort of my own kitchen table even though I rarely go down there. I live right above it, and there’s something symbolic in there about “the dark room beneath me”, but I think I’ll leave it there.
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