Love Notes
Love Notes distills a history formed through personal experiences and chance encounters. Five photographs taken by myself are paired with photographs of handwritten notes. Within these texts, written to Sophie Calle, Sherrie Levine, Jim Dow, Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, I explicate personal experiences that later inform artworks I make. Relationships between myself and subsequent inspirations are traced, such as Walker Evans and Jim Dow, the former experienced through prints made by the latter, which were shown in a class I attended at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Love Notes is a personal narrative, here used as a research platform to examine how all art histories are ultimately created.
After Sophie Calle, 2013
TEXT: Sophie, Your refusal to be pinned down as a photographer or a performer (or anything else) makes me consider text and image. One never really trumps the other. I love that duality between the two the same way I love the duality between your tightly bound diptychs and your expressive presence in a room. When I saw your lecture I felt like you were speaking across the auditorium just to me, telling me how to use my life, and from my life, how to make a work of art.
After Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1981, 2013
TEXT: Sherrie, Whenever I think of my photographs paying homage to other artists, I think of you. You make pictures of pictures to emulate and elevate and have them for yourself. Your photos are love notes, pieces you couldn't leave behind. Mine are, too.
After Walker Evans, 2013
TEXT: Walker, I've seen your prints in museums but the ones that struck me most were prints you didn't make. Jim Dow showed me his set of prints from your negatives: my proximity to those images was mind-blowing. I appreciate their frankness, how they aren't kidding, how they show me what they show me and don't try to be something else. I love that. Now I can't separate you and Jim. When I see your photographs I think of him and when I take pictures as documents I think about your images.
After Jim Dow, American Studies, 2013
TEXT: Jim, You were the one who taught me how to use a large format camera. I fell in love with photography in your class, fascinated by ground glass and backwards images. Now I think about your pictures of the roadside every time I balance my clunky camera and stare through its back, every time I pull back the bellows and see everything come into focus again.
After Stephen Shore, American Surfaces, 2013
TEXT: Stephen, When I make a picture of a banal surface, interested in how light reflects back towards my film, I think of you. I think of you when I want to travel and record my experiences for later. I think of the time I saw your lecture and shook your hand after you signed a book for me. Stephen, I think of your photos almost every day.