Oh dear friends I am all a flutter with dreaming up stories, making props like dresses and geese, acquiring props like the above composition dolls from the 1930's and setting up moments. The ideas are coming so quickly now I'm squirreling them away in a notebook and hoping that someday they'll come to be.
Some of these recent images will be a part of my upcoming show, Elements of Mystery, opening on Thursday March 31st at Perspectives Gallery, 1310 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, Il. There will be an artists reception on April 2nd from 5-8p.m. and an artists talk on April 21st at 7p.m. I will be sharing the space with fellow gallery member Mark Kaufman, and guest photographers Juan Giraldo and Victor Yanez-Lazcano curated by Albi Gallery.
I've been working on a little artist's statement about my work that reads something like this:
As a child some weekends we visited my grandparents in a farmhouse of decaying grandeur in New Jersey and other weekends we’d stay home and traipse through the halls of great New York City museums. I always imagined how these places could be different, how they were a portal to another time, an imagined life. In the attic of my grandparents' home there were dust covered steamer trunks filled with ballgowns while the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered a glimpse into the interiors of early American homes. I dreamt of wearing these ballgowns and living in a different era, but despite my dreamy nature I never got much beyond dress-up in shoddy 1970’s halloween costumes. As the mother of two girls with fanciful imaginations in an era when unfettered childhood fantasy is interrupted or negated by an abundant access to technology I have sought to preserve and create for my daughters a little bit of the magic I longed to have brought into my childhood reality.
I find great inspiration in fairytales as well as the world around me. Every fairytale has a dark side, the death of a parent, the loss of a power. In an era of social and political upheaval and environmental degradation, the dreams and fantasy of a child are effected and shaped by the external forces buzzing in the world around them. At home our conversations move from topics of migration, to an exploration of old time dance steps, to what a potential leader might do with their power, to the backstory of a historical American Girl Doll. All of these bits and musings come into play when I am making pictures, the dreams mingled with the harshness of reality.
So that's my shtick, perhaps you'll join me to celebrate. I'm a bit over the moon about sharing this work with the world.