In my “Room” series, the photographs are diptychs that feature semi-naked women’s bodies twisted and split between panels, and then reassembled in impossible ways. Like the magician’s lovely assistant, each of these women is sawed in half and put back together again, simultaneously displaying and disrupting the classic ideal of the female nude.
Unlike most nudes, the diptychs in “Room” are contextual portraits. Part ethnography, part boudoir photography, each diptych is as much about the personal space of the domestic environment as it is about the body, leaving us wanting to know more about the woman who occupies the room. Although the artifacts in their rooms reflect the messy, incongruous, and generational markers of the women’s lives, the photographs resist a facile reading of identity. Gender gets confused because hair, muscles, skin, cellulite, acne, and bones all read as masculine. Also, the objects in the room don’t all lead to the models. In fact, some of things the viewer sees belong to me, pointing to the fact that I am in the room directing the models, and reminding us that the artistic image of the female nude is not natural, or a given, but is a highly constructed convention. The way that the diptych form severs the women’s bodies underscores both this constructedness as well as the very unnaturalness of the politics of the female nude as uncritical trope of art history.
The diptychs are about a kind of refusal, an obstinate desire to make the viewer look at the fantasy of the body as a whole (the seeming möbius strip of the woman’s body), and yet not have visual access to the face or the breasts. The women in these photographs are not simply magician’s assistants. Very aware of the politics of the piece, these women allowed themselves to be exposed in order to participate in a kind of re-invention, or turning inside out of the female nude, flaunting their bodies as an activist gesture. I am grateful to them for participating in the project. The diptychs in “Room” are in equal parts paean to the overexposed female body, contextual ethnographic portrait, and performative exhibition, a combination that hopefully allows room for a more expansive viewer of women’s role in art/history.