Parallax (Séance for the Self) [2021]
installation, series of 7 double exposures on RC photographic paper shot with 1966 Minolta Hi-Matic 7s, 25.4x20.3cm
etiäinen (Finnish) — an image, doppelgänger, or just an impression that goes ahead of a person, doing things the person in question later does. They are spontaneous and cannot be induced
‘Parallax (Séance for the Self)’ is my love letter to 19th Century photographic practices of the carte-de-visite, the chronophotograph and the Victorian-era spirit photography of William Mumler (1832–1884) and other Spiritualist shysters.
Acknowledging traditional methods and the history of portrait photography, the seven photographs/stills present a series of moments, dislocated and frozen in time floating yet suspended by visible wire. Situated around a circular séance table, images previously obscured become visible once one is forced to enter and cross the boundary between passive viewer into active participant. Framed like a zoetrope, frames move and jump as a cyclical loop of simultaneous dressing and undressing occur. Time moves, yet is remains unwaveringly repetitive.
Séance derived from the French word for "session", from the Old French seoir, "to sit" such as séance de cinema “to sit for a movie, Parallax pays homage to Kostümfilm and Weimar Germany Expressionist visionaries such as Max Ernst, Fritz Lang, Robert Weine & F. W. Murnau - costume, chiaroscuro, exaggerated bodily movements and the doppelgänger evoke a campy, theatrical séance for summoning the self. Like the semi-autobiographical works of Tracey Moffatt and Cindy Sherman, who evoke a nostalgia for cinema and costume, in summoning one’s own etiäinen, the authenticity of the photograph is questioned as an objective reflection of reality or a constructed object.
What is candid?
What is posed?
Am I the magician?
Or am I medium?
And how does the autonomous camera sit amongst all of this?
Through visual slippages in space and bodily bilocation, parallax misalignment prominent on rangefinder cameras becomes amplified through double exposures creating new parallel worlds co-existing & co-dependent on each other.
