As a photographer I am interested in people, places, and things. These interests did not change with the pandemic and sequestration, but the opportunity to pursue them did. The people I was sequestered with were not all that eager to be photographed over and over again, and the places I was sequestered in tended to be private rather than public. As a photographer trying to stay photographically fit, I was obliged to rely almost exclusively on "things" as subjects - on still lifes.
Stacks of flattened cardboard and bags of clothing are compressed into ceramic cubes, their bulging surfaces recording the tension of containment. Glass bubble-wrap sculptures from Hivert's Demi-Jour series line shelves-fragile objects posing as protective shells for absent contents. A bronze cast of work gloves rests nearby, monumentalizing gestures of past labor. In the background, torn collages evoke the weathered palimpsests of wheatpaste advertisements caught between removal and renewal.
In Kris Kuksi's "Leda and the Swan," the mythical woman sits nude and slightly less voluptuous than Rubens and Cézanne's versions of her. In this mixed-media assemblage, the mother of Helen of Troy is surrounded by cities that literally rise above her and more that are flipped upside down. Train tracks crumble. Armies go to battle. Severed heads hang from the trees that loom over the scenes.
