Haunting
I cannot escape sites of burial now. I see them everywhere and they follow me.
Repetition is a type of haunting. Sociologist Avery Gordon writes about how the past always haunts the present. Our perception is molded by the ghosts of social repressions, disappearances, absences, and losses produced by the conditions of modern life. She asks us to imagine beyond the limits of what is already understandable. If we accommodate what we view as fiction into our vocabularies, we might acknowledge the gaps made unknown by the existing superstructures of power and history.
I use this idea as a call to look at what lies outside the frame of the photograph, a device that constructs how memory is made and maintained. I stay open to the ghosts, waiting for them to bleed through my images. I rely on phenomenology, valuing what I observe to be unexplainable. It is in this liminal space that my role as an artist doing research becomes essential. There will always be gaps between knowing and not knowing, my body and what I observe, and the translations of my experiences. I still rely on and apply structures that allow me to disentangle and process my thoughts, but as an artist, I give myself permission to sit where the ghosts dwell.
I cannot escape sites of burial now. I see them everywhere and they follow me.
Repetition is a type of haunting. Sociologist Avery Gordon writes about how the past always haunts the present. Our perception is molded by the ghosts of social repressions, disappearances, absences, and losses produced by the conditions of modern life. She asks us to imagine beyond the limits of what is already understandable. If we accommodate what we view as fiction into our vocabularies, we might acknowledge the gaps made unknown by the existing superstructures of power and history.
I use this idea as a call to look at what lies outside the frame of the photograph, a device that constructs how memory is made and maintained. I stay open to the ghosts, waiting for them to bleed through my images. I rely on phenomenology, valuing what I observe to be unexplainable. It is in this liminal space that my role as an artist doing research becomes essential. There will always be gaps between knowing and not knowing, my body and what I observe, and the translations of my experiences. I still rely on and apply structures that allow me to disentangle and process my thoughts, but as an artist, I give myself permission to sit where the ghosts dwell.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.