Shadows (2022)

South Bend Museum of Art

Shadows 1 (J.), 2 (S.), 3 (M.), 4 (L.), 5 (M.), 6 (A.), 7 (S.), 8 (S.)

Materials: Cast resin epoxy, frontispiece tissue, cut paper silhouettes, green bottle fly, found spider, black house fly, and Indiana Senate Bill #1.

This series, Shadows (2022), responds to archival research done while on fellowship at the Wylie Museum in Bloomington, Indiana. Collecting poetic and historic fragments, these resin casts explore the repressed narratives of historic 19th and 21st century Indiana women. In direct dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection of family silhouettes, letters, and ephemera, Shadows references not only oppressions of 19th century women, the disquieting through lines of control and destruction that date back to the Salem witch trials, but also questions the status of women in 2022.

The following motifs are present in this work: 

1. The shadow. Shadows were necessary to create the museum's permanent collection of traditional silhouette portraits. The absence of light, the opposite of a self, was traced with a device called a physiognotrace. This work references the physiognotrace’s process of producing multiple shadow copies, simultaneously. 21st century visitors will never see historic women clearly—only at a distance and without full detail, not unlike a reduced, flattened, black void. 

2. Authorship. The animated cut-paper silhouette relies on the referent of the archive, incomplete as it is. It, thus, calls into question the institutional narratives that shape who’s deeds get remembered and how they are recorded. The interstitial gap between fixed images is an absence of form.

3. The text. Citing words directly from 19th century archives as well as from recent Indiana legislation, the work juxtaposes “text” and “image,” as well as the legal processes that shape the freedoms or oppressions of women through time. The work seeks to ask—what is the visual and textual language of an archive in resonance with the patriarchal writs of today?

Shadows re-animates possibilities that did not exist in the past, a project which reframes our own contemporary moment. The image cast in-between layers of resign and time draws up the framework of an alternative world which a viewer can dream themselves into. As Deleuze writes: