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was born in Brooklyn, New York by two parents who were not New Yorkers and had a childhood
where I was taken to a lot of theater and dance and music and museums and in that time
my earliest memory of photography and my interest in it was that I had a really, really
bad cold.
I had a flu one winter and was sick in bed and boxes and boxes of Kleenex tissues and
on the back of one of the boxes of tissues was a coupon for a Polaroid camera.
And so since I had been blowing my nose endlessly for what seemed days on end, I then cut out
all of the coupons and put them in an envelope and sent off my Polaroid camera.
So that was the first camera, although we had cameras in the house, that was my own
personal camera.
Growing up in Queens, New York, I went to the High School of Art and Design, so very
early on I made choices, what seemed at the time very arbitrarily to pursue art, getting
out of high school.
It just seemed very natural to me to go to an art college, which was a school of visual
arts.
And then I had to take as an elective as one of the courses, photography, and I found myself
in the dark room for 15 hours a day, without demand, just learning the material, going
out on the street and shooting.
So I quickly realized, you know, your heart is where you spend your time.
Going to California was interesting because it was a completely different environment
for me, intellectually, there's a more conceptual school.
It was a perfect environment for this kind of taking a break and thinking about what
would be my relationship to my work.
Because I was not interested in so much in performing myself, but I was interested in
this kind of storytelling in kind of all these different modes, but it gave me a chance to
think about the mechanics of storytelling or filmmaking or the mechanics of thinking
about audience and subject.
For many different reasons, I preferred to be back in New York.
Another friend who's also a curator and writer, Kelly Jones, told me, oh, you know, you're
back, that's great.
I'm working at this startup, small private museum that just has offices right now and,
you know, we need a receptionist, would you be interested?
I said, sure, you know, I need a job, I'm back, and I got the job as a receptionist.
Because it was in a loft, I would use the office as a studio.
So I actually shot Water Bearer at that office at night.
For me, Water Bearer is about kind of memory, but then the value of memory.
And in its subjectivity, its value, a value of being recognized or dismissed.
The early photographs from the 80s until about the early 90s eliminate the face.
It's a portrait, but who is the subject becomes the question.
And then for that matter, what is the intention of the photographer, what the text kind of
either supports or takes away a different position of what you might expect.
Living in Brooklyn, at that particular time for two blocks, every other shop was a wig
shop.
It was a way of me kind of making a departure from the work that I had made before.
Still using an element that is an identification in terms of appearance.
One might choose to wear their hair or to wear a wig or to assume an identity or to
invent an identity for oneself becomes kind of the undercurrent of that particular piece.
Felt in terms of printing an image on it, either through lithography or silk screening,
had this different quality to it.
It kind of transformed the photographic image into something that was much softer and felt
more like a drawing.
The photo booth pieces are quite amazing because they're based on images from the 1920s up
until about the 70s, where people sit in photo booths or have their kind of self-portraits,
where people are kind of mimicking and positioning themselves for the camera.
I came across one image of a woman who was leaning against a car.
She took on to learn how to pose in front of the camera.
I thought, this is a really interesting image and I bought it on eBay.
And immediately after purchasing it, the seller said to me, oh, well, I have this collection
of images.
I don't know who this is, blah, blah, blah.
But it seems like we have about 200 or 300 Samite images of this woman.
Are you interested in purchasing it?
And I said, absolutely.
And so I purchased them and thought to myself, well, what would I do with them?
What would be interesting about this?
And for me, it was to kind of present and expand her project by me taking on her character
and mimicking her.
And there's also a man who also appears in the project as a photographer.
So I also imitate him.
So at first, in looking at all these images that are on the wall, you wouldn't necessarily
be able to tell the difference.
You kind of, after a while, see that I am in it mimicking them.
And so to cap that project off, there are two images where the male and female character
are playing chess.
They don't appear together in a shot, playing with one another.
So I took that as I wanted to make a video of them playing chess in this way.
What's interesting about the reflections is that they are not symmetrical.
So at first glance, it seems like it could be five different people somewhat dressed
similarly.
But it's confusing because in reflections, I think when we view them, we assume some
kind of symmetry in terms of the positions of each individual.
It's not like a Hitchcock Hall of Mirrors where the image is repeated symmetrically
infinitely.
There are five different images that are slightly different from one another.
In the same position as the characters, we put a kind of baby grand piano.
The sequence in the music that was within chess is an improvised performance by Jason
in that moment for this piece.
You have an image that's not going to be noticed.
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