Your Hands Were Making Artifacts In the Corners of My Mind

Amy Sillman writes in her essay Further Notes on Shape, that “basically everything in the world is a shape. It’s so mundane and so ubiquitous: every edge, corner, blob, form, silhouette, or negative space is something you have to navigate to get through a room. If you think of shape as figure/ground, then every shape is a figure and the ground is the whole world. Shapes are how you make distinctions, get the lay of the land, or even tell time.” Broadly, this analogy stretches across many disciplines, and is both a conceptual and technical question. What “shapes” do we prioritize in a composition, an image, in a group critique, and what “world” do these questions live in?

I channeled this prompt from curator Jonathan Herrera Soto and interpreted the five-part photographic series that is Ms. Bessie’s Big One, a mini-story that chronicles sufficiency and covetousness. I wanted this piece to radiate in a world of unstructured shapes and movements, a world that was as euphoric as it was sarcastic and selfish. My self-portrait practice, at its core, has always remained selfish. Sometimes it seems that we need to be in more places than one, performing in more ways than one. And we can have fun with them and be generous when it feels right, or it can be a downfall to something cavernous. Ultimately, I created this piece and continue to pick up a camera because it holds me dearest within all of my forms, and in a way allows me to be as singular as I need to be to give and implement.

 Your Hands Were Making Artifacts in the Corner of My Mind is curated by Jonathan Herrera Soto featuring the work of Ms. Bessie’s Big One and 22 other artists who are part of the PF Studios program.