Should Lady Gaga be wearing a rape-aXe as well?
We shoot together or separately, depending on the project. We share the role of model and photographer in some projects.
We research, argue and compromise as we develop and edit a body of work. We consider our work a conversation that is part of the communal storytelling process; the fluid and mutable development of a mythology. On a practical level, working with a partner provides critique, a willing model, a road trip companion, an assistant, an editor.
Bridging the distance between two cities, we meet halfway on the state line, spend long hours talking on the phone, emailing, blogging in our Notebooks or we retreat for days into the studio.
Space to think at Ragdale Foundation residencies
“The sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice....”
Heraclitus, 5th century BCE
Dialogues with Michelangelo (Delphic Sibyl) from All Things Are Always Changing
Dialogues with Michelangelo (Erythrian Sibyl) from All Things Are Always ChangingIn ancient Greece, the Sibyls channeled the prophetic wisdom of the gods. They would usually descend into a cave or someplace where fetid air was conducive to trances and hallucinations. Channeling of the sort was witnessed by Aeneas.
Michelangelo has been the authority for the rendering of the human figure for over five hundered years. He had a specific agenda for the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Michelangelo worked with papal advisor Egidio da Viterbo on the ceiling's imagery. da Viterbo's was charged with the justification of the political agenda of Pope Julius II--the creation of a golden age of worldwide Christendom prophesied by Cumean Sibyl. Biblical and ancient Greek imagery would speak with much more authority than contemporary prophets like Savanarola.
from Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
Inspired and dismayed by these depictions, we engaged the Sistine Chapel ceiling's Sibyls and Prophets in conversation. These inflated forms of robes with tomes have a visual authority, but we challenge their pomposity. We our own agenda was to find the wisdom and divinity in the body. Our images ask what authority and power are conjured by these gestures and poses in the 21st century?
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see post McGuane Park Masters Swim Team, March 2009
Portrait from All Things Are Always Changing
While Greek sculpture presented the ideal, divinity and perfection; it did not reproduce particular details rather they strove to present an "eternal identity". Romans were concerned with depicting the individual. Their work emerged from veneration of their own ancestors, not veneration of their gods.
The magnificence of Roman portraiture commemorated ancestors, lineage, authority, prowess. We began to photographed older women not simply because of their accomplishments, but to venerate them for having endured, for their wisdom and for their beauty.
Some notes on the evolution of Roman Portraits from Ludwig Goldscheider:
The Etruscans were the first in the Mediterrean to depict natural likeness on their sarcophagus figures. Later, 'every aristocratic or well-to-do middle-class Roman house had in its drawing room, the atrium, al collection of family statues, likenesses of ancestors, cast in wax, death masks. These masks were brought out for special celebrations and worn in funeral processions in order to "resurrect" the loved one so many generations of the family could be represented'. "At the funeral of Julius Caesar there was a pivot, with the face and body showing the three-and-twenty stabs."
To preserve these wax masks, bronze or terra cotta casts were made. The features of the individual were specific, the bodies were generic. Because these masks were not animated living face, techniques were developed to accommodate the principles of an illusionistic style. The use of white marble, skin and hair textural treatment with the use of a drill to intensify highlight and shadow detail, drilling out pupils and emphasis on the eyes as an expressive element.
Portraits began to be made in one's lifetime and used as gifts to friends. Ultimately "the right to the public exhibition of a statue was purchasable in Rome", and no site was thought unworthy of this mark of civic appreciation. Likenesses of prominent citizens as well as gladiators, courtesans, and minions stood in temples among the images of the gods. Though few remain, painted portraits were common and exhibited in public spaces.
By the first through the forth century A.D., imperial likenesses and medallions were multiplied and sent to the the provinces as a way to advertise and consolidate power.
Meditations on Venus from All Things Are Always Changing
Meditation (Metamorphosis)thinning hair
the bush is bare
now the heart is bleedy
the body; needy.
What does it take to be saved?
still quivering sex
begins to mascerate
dissipate
disappoint
disappear
What does it take to be saved?
numberless trifling matters
breeding extraordinary matters too numberless for keeping score.
Pelvic floor? out the door.
No more sloffing of the womb,
changed alignments of the moon
on the wane
different stain.
Night’s hot waves flaccid,
rolling over
dimpled stone
thinning bone
What does it take to be saved?
very cold, very strange
sliding down the slippery slope
no hope
for repair.
despair.
what makes this fair?
shed a breast
lose a womb
amble toward the tomb
is this what it is to be saved?
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Portraits from All Things Are Always Changing2.jpg)
Portraits from All Things Are Always Changing
Venus is a representation of social values and an ideal which transcends reality. Venus fulfills a need. Consider our little girls and our social values....plastic! it's fantastic!
