Historical Takes
Collaborators: Eleanor Antin, Roxanne Mather, Erin Adams, Tom Adams
Plasir d'Armour (After Couture) Chromogenic print 70 x 106 in.
Judgement of Paris (after Reubens) - Dark Helen Chromogenic print 36 x 71 in.
Judgement of Paris (after Reubens) - Light Helen Chromogenic print 36 x 71 in.
Working as the production arm of noted performance artist Eleanor Antin, I helped oversee and facilitate the construction of three series of chromogenic prints within her Historical Takes series dealing with notions of mythology and how through artistic technique they can be represented as contemporary fact.
Film in our culture is firmly tied to fiction and illusion. Painting is pretty much a historical ruin. However, some form of photography seems to be the obligatory mode of the present, or at least it’s the mode of modernism, with its ground in technology and its nearly legendary claim to facticity. This is admittedly an ironical facticity, however photography inevitably evokes the notion of fact.
In these particular works, photography is engaging with nineteenth-century French and English salon painting, which laid claims to the self-flattering myths of empire in which these cultures wrapped themselves and in which we also wrap ourselves.
In these ancient mythologies it important to see how they rhyme with our own lives and illuminate our experiences in the present.
These photographs are impossible facts.
Plasir d'Armour (After Couture)
Judgement of Paris (after Reubens)
