Final Proposal : Monday Nov 16

Title: Surrogate

Abstract:

1) Creating abstract and colored photographs of bulbously muscled men while simultaneously video taping the process of us in the process of making the photographs. The images symbolize the retreating memories of a past relationship, and the resulting obsession with largely sculpted male bodies. This series will also serve as a portrait of myself in relation to these men and these bodies which remain in the background.

Motivation: I am concerned with this issue of comfort, fear, safety, and violence and I want to address this using these strong male bodies. (This is where I am placing the project in terms of its relevance in society and what it is about in a broader sense - more relatable, less personal) I want to refer to the comforts provided by emotional partnerships, along side the personal and political concerns of safety and sexual violence. I will do this by further fetishizing strong and masculine male bodies that when partnered with, theoretically, offer safety. I am also concerned with commemorating this past relationship by attempting to make a portrait of him using other men, and a portrait of myself using their participating with me in creating the images. The whole body of the project results in a broad portrait of myself. This portrait consists of my desire to address the fleeting memory, my asthetic interest in photographs, my participation in the social trend of browsing for men online, and the objectification/fetishization of the strong male body within my shoots with men.

(There is also the issue of the threats and safety issues of interacting with men, and partiuclarly strangers online. **)

Surrogate

The next body of work will focus on male and female bodies (my own), depicted in photographs and simultaneously, in video recordings of the photographs being produced. My subject will be heavily muscled men, bulbous in shape, with grotesque protrusions and with statures which greatly exceed my own. I will photograph these men using extremely bright and saturated light, which will in certain areas, wash away detail and recognizability from the figure. The intention is to further warp the familiarity of the bodies, and alter the body builder association. The images will all be tightly framed on certain muscles, allowing the muscles to produce shadows on its own body using the artificial light. The presence of hair, or lack of will serve to create an unsavoury texture at such a close range.

In addition to the still images the project will include video documentation of the photos being created. The production aspect of this project is important for the way in which the entire project will be viewed. I am beginning this work by talking to men online and on dating websites which have the bulbous, protruding, muscled bodies. I explain to them that I work with photography, and that I would like to photograph them for a project of fit men. We are than meeting in an apartment or private studio. I will than video the process of the two of us cooperating in making the images. The reasons I have chosen largely muscled men is to highlight our difference is size, their physical power over me, and as a personal fetishization of a man that was once in my life, whose body I no longer have access to. This man's body was huge and shapely, with incredibly defined pecks, large thighs, and that stood at about 6’3. I had tried many times to make photographs of this man, but he insisted that I was "objectifying" him, and he was against it. He maintained that I could only have access to his body after being given permission, and that the photographs would detach him from our relationship. This relationship is over, and I am using these bodies as a surrogate for his. This series is about control and cooperation. While we were together, in order to prevent my professional interest in photography from damaging that which is now "the lost relationship", I respected that I had been forbidden from making images which depicted him as a sculptural object. My attempt now is to make an image of that body, which he believed would only have been an objectification of his body and his beauty. My goal is to make an image/object which represents that love and desire, which is retreating into memory- rending them symbolic.

Technically, I think this whole project is really a strange take on the self portrait because the work is more about me in relationship to these bodies than about the bodies themselves. Self portraiture is the only realm of photography I have ever really felt was valuable for me, but as I dealt with critique of my work, the reoccurring comment is that I was too typically female and typically beautiful for the images to be transgressive. In these previous works, I attempted to pair myself with a large masculine creature, the brahman, but the critique than became centred around the myth of Europa, animal/female partnership, mythology, and was again not about interpersonal power dynamics or partnerships. The cattle project was created as an attempt for me to continue working with self portraits, but to put myself in relation to these strong and sometimes frightening creatures. As with sometimes with men, I found myself in potential danger, but with these animals, I in a way had the control as I was the one directing the scene. I entered into their environment, and placed myself with them - not the other way around.

Trying to move away from cattle, I started looking for a more powerful and exotic creature to juxtapose my own delicate form with, and I think that the most appropriately exotic creature will be these abnormally muscled men. An important addition to the work is this documentation of the image making, partly to show the threat of safety, and also the fact that I am volunteering to put myself in this situation. In most all male/female situations, the man is physically more capable of harm or dominance, and what I am doing with these photo/video shoots is taking control of their bodies with out having the muscular power to do so. In combination with my fetishization of physically strong men, I would like to deal with a more literally defined self portrait. As I read about the grotesque body, and these physical protrusions, I've thought about how I can use my conflicted mental state as a representation of the grotesque body. As I mentioned before, it has been a challenge for me to try and use my own body for this because of my feminine and soft features.

Project two: Drinking (working title)

In reading "The Grotesque Image of The Body" from Bakhtin on Rabelais, there is a focus on the grotesque body in two parts, the "upper stratum" and "lower stratum". From Rabelias's perspective, the grotesque lies in the lower stratum. For example, excrement, vomit, mucus, urine, and birth. However, I am not interesting in making work that involves any of these specific acts. But I am very interested in the image of the "gaping mouth" as a symbol for what goes in, and what comes out.

I want to make a video that focuses on the mouth and incorporates a gel, mucus like substance. I will do a variety of experiments using video in combination with home made gels, and perform a kind of expulsion. This purpose of this project is to have a video area of my portfolio that includes the highly astheticized quality of my photographs. I am going to mimic, to some degree, the aesthetic of Marilyn Minters “Pink Caviar”, and Asger Carlsen's photo of the soaking vagina. What I would like to avoid, which is a heavy feature of "Pink Caviar", is the strong eroticization of the mouth. My work always has an eroticism to it, and that is not to be avoided entirely, but I do not want the work to be sorely sexual. I want to focus on this obscene act of expelling something from inside the belly, and then taking it all back down again. There is a quite literal symbolism to this project, which is the expelling of something physical in order to cleanse yourself of the mental or spiritual. In shamanic traditions using certain psychedelic substances, the first step is that of "purging" which toxic to the soul by vomiting. In this video, I want the "purging" to fail, as the mouth will reabsorb the gel by being set on a loop.

Exhibition: the video edit will include sections and men from all the shoots included in the project. I will make selections which include a lot of the areas where the flash fires so that you see that pop of color from my strobes. The audio will be separated from each video, and the interesting audio will be all streamed together into one audio track which will be played over with the video edit. The colored images : I really do not know what I am going to do with them yet. If printed and framed, printed and framed very small. Like 5'7 inches and all hung closely together in a grid. In addition to the still images of the bodies, the videos of the shoots, I would like to exhibit the abstract slow motion video of the bull's muscles along with everything. What is beautiful about the male photographs are the same details which make these videos beautiful. Strange, unrecognizable shapes which are clearly from a living animal. I think the inclusion of the videos will help pull all of my previous works into this one presentation.