IMAGO*
Empowered by a friend leaving an incredibly violent abusive situation.
I reflect.
Imposing damning secrets on a young child's ears.
Silence.
Golden boys getting away with incest.
Silence.
Alcoholic stepfather's disgusting caresses.
Still, silence.
The oppressive weight of secrets.
Carried for decades.
Baggage that was not mine but became so.
The load of these burdens.
The weight of the male gaze,
the backward whistle,
“Enjoy it now," she says, “It will not last.”
Silence no more.
I scream for them, for me.
Ripping off the blindfold, we see and are seen.
Now.
Look.
I dare you.
* Oxford Dictionary defines imago as: 1. the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect, typically winged (from entomology); and 2. an unconscious idealized mental image of someone, especially a parent, which influences a person's behavior (from psychoanalysis).
takeFLIGHT was conceived as an installation to be presented in April, 2020, in New York City.
It explores the physical and emotional journey of motherhood.
Now… words fail, emotions scatter, and this work expands in a new light. It remains a journey, but is now one which we are all experiencing… all being pushed to face.
As we remain isolated and very much grounded, I offer you a small selection of takeFLIGHT.
*process:
work shot on film with Hasselblad camera
printed then adhered onto cradled wood board
layered with wax and resin
real butterfly wings encased in wax
the space between sky and earth
the place where birds fly
empty air
internal hollowness
vague
emptiness
a state when feet do not touch the ground
inability to decide between two things
midway
a creation of memories
of a time before
of a place i crave
of owning the space, i have
if only for a second
*process:
work shot on film with Hasselblad camera
printed then adhered onto a cradled wood board
layered with wax and resin
I was born a Southerner, but I don’t have a Southern heart.
I have been around the world and with reluctant acceptance I have returned and will stay. There is a beauty, stability, and comfort here, and so I will call it home.
But there is also a history that weighs on my soul and creates a restlessness that stays with me, suffocates me, here.
Midway is an autobiographic body of work, juxtaposing the death of my father with the birth of both my children. The future was forming, the present was deteriorating, and the past was struggling to survive.
I took my camera to little-known town off Interstate 95 to portray a small, forgotten town in the middle of rural Georgia, a scenescape rich with Civil War and Civil Rights history, a deep Southern community with a fading story. The black and white images capture a history rich with sometimes-blurred sentiments of good and evil. The endangerment of the physical past likewise mirrors my own life perspective from a time where life confronted death. My subject, standing alone in vast spaces void of all identifiable factors, communicates the solitude of my contemplative state as this body took shape.
I am Midway.
Where time stands still, if just for a moment.
Where black and white co-exist only in photograph.
I become the bridge spanning one generation to another.
I embrace the vast spaces stripped bare of time and place.
The fear of losing freedom gives way to a desire to be rooted.
Where white churches stand tall and historic relics crumble.
There lives both good and evil.
I will preserve it in wax.
I am Midway.
This collection was borne of a tumultuous time when, on the heels of the birth of my first son, my father lost his long-fought battle with cancer. Unbeknownst to me, I had recently conceived my second son and was carrying him with me.
Becoming a mother lit a fire under me, heightening the need and desire to leave my mark, which explains why this collection was charged with an almost manic appetite for shooting. Taking friends as subjects, I traveled to the Boneyard, a deserted beach on a largely uninhabited island off the coast of Georgia, to Ossabaw Island where the trees slowly erode into the sea. Those images would become my visual diary from a time when death and birth collided head-on.
From age seven, I studied Judaism three days a week, with one ever-present theme in my course of study being the Holocaust. I am a torchbearer for this atrocity, allegiant to my knowledge of all that was taken and all that was lost.
My personal connection to the Holocaust came to me later in life, when my Great Uncle Bernard's journal was passed along to me. As openly as the Jewish community mourned victims of the Holocaust, my family had kept hidden our own loss. Three centuries of Makovers had lived in Poland. My great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, their children, and their children’s children lived there until 1939, when the Nazi’s invaded Poland; there, trail of information abruptly stops. My ancestors seemingly disappeared, never to be heard from again.
In 2000, I traveled alone to Poland for eight months, with my great uncle’s journal as my companion, searching for information to fill the gaps in my own history. I visited abandoned synagogues, desecrated cemeteries, and concentration camps.
My photographs speak of the death that surrounded me and of the ghosts that spoke to me. Though facilitated by the length of time available for shooting and the great sense of purpose underwriting the project, Poland marks my most emotionally wrought body of work.
If only I could see your face
No pictures
My grandfather could recall you from memory
I can not
The atrocities continue
Our history has been wiped out
Erased
For those who have never seen
will never see
No memories
No photos
No objects to be passed down
Nothing
All erased
No house
No street
No grave
The tragedy continues
The tragedy is passed down
Excerpt from my Poland journal: June 17, 2000
This body of work was captured over a period of five years, spanning my time as an artist in residence in St. Remy to my photography professorship with SCAD in Lacoste. It represents a period of relative emotional pause, given the intensity of the subject matter comprising my first two professional installments.
Inspired again by place, I embraced an unique levity as I dined on France's people, landscapes, light, cuisine, and artistic forebears Matisse and Renoir.
This collection is, indisputably, my breath of fresh air.
Since I became a photographer, my art has enabled me to capture life's most challenging themes – birth, death, family – and present them with beauty. It began with this project, my personal journey back to my beginnings.
Mine is a family of powerful women and complex relationships interwoven as a result of my parents' three respective marriages. With religion, background, and age diverse among each generation of industrious women, our mosaic was forged of passion, pain, and love. I, the youngest, was confused by the complexities created before my birth and haunted by secrets shielded from me by youth.
When college called, I fought to pull myself free. That journey took me far, to the Middle East, where I realized that I was ahead of myself. Questions that arose from my feelings of loneliness and alienation led me to shoot. I knew I needed to begin again and so I returned home to research the child's pain with my adult eyes.
The result is Family: photographs of three generations of women, my mother, sisters, and nieces. This body of work is conceived of my search for answers and introduces the feminine voice that I would carry forth throughout my work.
