mother / me

You go down, you go down again, alone, under the ground. Under the ground where we seemed to be walking. The one, the other. The one or the other. You abandon your firmness, your uprightness. Your steps, your features hardened by the determination that accompanies solitude. You return to this cave whose entrance you couldn’t find. To this cellar whose doorway you’ve forgotten. To this hole in your memory where the silence of my birth from you was buried-the silence of my separation, inseparable from you. To the obscurity of your conception of me.

     One Doesn’t Stir without the Other, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Vivienne Wenzel

Fusing photography and video as well as the subjects, mother / me depicts the artist and his biological mother as they invent and reinterpret the factual and fabricated happenings of their collective life. Conflating the real with the ideal, the two perform relational boundaries as they grant their bodies political agency. With excess and sensuality, the body becomes double, becomes mirror, becomes alter, becomes altar. Passionate exaggerations of the trivial, each tableau speaks of materialized conceptions of connectedness and isolation in the image, idea, and construction of their mother/child relationship.

Self-Portrait with Mother (Serve)
2018
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
2:18

Self-Portrait with Mother (Heat)
2019
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
3:23

Self-Portrait with Mother (Sacrament)
2018
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
3:00

Self-Portrait with Mother (Eucharist)
2018
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
2:33

Self-Portrait with Mother (Twins)
2018
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
3:00

Self-Portrait with Mother (Dusk)
2018
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
3:42

Self-Portrait with Mother (Touch)
2019
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
3:11

Self-Portrait with Mother (Transfiguration)
2018
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
5:36

Self-Portrait with Mother (Offering)
Single-Channel 4K Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
3:24