MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths
My work is an ongoing process of experiential research. I approach portraiture as social exchange, using the relationship between artist and subject as my site of investigation. I find the particular transactions between painter and sitter or director and actor or photographer and subject, for example, to be particularly valuable. These image-making exchanges provide a dialogical microcosm within which to interrogate the politics of the image-world around us and the psychology of our relationship with it.
Modern Masterpieces
These double-frame works are made by distracting unsuspecting museum-goers, engrossed in significant artworks at Tate Modern, by photographing them. Momentarily stealing the viewers of these masterpieces, these diptychs explore the psychology of the complex relationship between artist, artwork and viewer.
Just as Lacan describes “the mirror stage” in which the infant sees itself for the first time as other, the subject of a photograph is forced to consider themselves as other, as a double of the Self. These works capture the momentary negotiation between their subjects’ private selves and a public encounter that takes place at the instant they realize that they have fallen prey to the photographer's lens. At that moment, the process of looking at art becomes one that is necessarily self-conscious.
Moving beyond dominant ways of understanding photography (for example, as a decisive moment or as a text or as an object), this work stems from an understanding of the image as a dialogical transaction, constituted within the power dynamics of the relationship between photographer and subject.
Unlike posed portraits, the actual act of photography is not suppressed or hidden here. With the photographer’s presence as apparent as that of the subject, these works form some kind of dubious self-portrait. The subjects of these photographs become the momentary site for an impossible collaboration, caught between the work of a dead artist and a living one. The iconoclastic strategy employed here plays out as a losing game, confounded not only by delusional ambition but by the limits of photographic representation itself.
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