This photographic installation manifests a synthesis of my investigations around performance, the body, public/private space, photographic representation, gendered paradigms, and movement choreography.

Life-size figures are intimately coupled with each other. These photographic cut-outs intertwine around the space, suggesting a moving duet:  part sleep, part dance; part real, part performance. The content of intimacy within the large photos is then contrasted with their grandiose form as well as their positioning toward the upper portions of the gallery space – which both create some inevitable distance from the viewer. In their formal execution and positioning, the cut-out photos become architectural pieces (taking a step further this architectural strategy utilized in my photo installation preceding this work, “Sacred Monster”) who are happy to call as their ancestors – say, the figurative friezes of classical Greek architecture.

But here, this upward space is inverted in the installation to be more akin to inside of the earth. The undulating, wet, brown, moving, changing surroundings of the transformed gallery space stands in opposition to the white, straight, rigid, dry, and rational walls of what is considered neutral, or the conventional standard for a gallery space within white american and western european culture. It is this alternative surrounding surface that forms the ground on which this photographic installation chooses to locate itself. This physical backdrop as it were, is simultaneously the ground of the earth, the backdrop in the studio, and the curtains of the theater. It is just this sort of play –  between the natural and the staged, between reality and performance that is being presented. In fact this inversion in the gallery space, as well as the androgyny, gender fluidity, and non-determined/fixed relationships among the persons depicted are all meant to exalt a queer reordering of things.