MUSÉE 29 – EVOLUTION
Evolution explores the concepts of progress, transformation, growth, and advancement in an age when images are taking a dramatic shift in the role they play in our lives.
During my time living in Jerusalem I decided to make work exclusively in the West Bank, I made a number of works using photography, painting, sculpture and process biased art, and one work seemed to lead to the next. One day while out in the South Hebron Hills visiting a tribe of Bedouin who live in caves, I came across the landfill site in this work. I returned a number of times to view the location and eventually decided to make work there.
My notebooks are filled with ideas for new works. One or two will surface as I scan them from time to time. Sometimes an idea appears in my notebooks several times over the years in slightly different forms, until the work is finally ready to be created.
When you are the child of a junk man, especially when you are not going into the family junkyard business, there's something I want to escape about that. Because of the painful thing my family and I had to endure, but also because it's not the life I wanted. So my obsession with escapist locations and photographs investigating our needs to escape, certainly come from a childhood need.
In general, I tend to look more and more into the little things of life. Particularly with photography, I try to find the essence in a very reduced form. Reduced to the max. The flood of images today just frightens me. As I mentioned in the introduction, we have to ensure our existence all our life by buying, accumulating, hoarding things that are then left behind when we die.
I came to those structures through a very chaotic approach. I spent two summers photographing locusts, or grasshopper swarms in Utah, Nevada. I was very interested in the history of the Rocky Mountain locusts, which were the largest conglomeration of terrestrial animals that the earth has ever witnessed.
My real start when was when my party photos caught Anna Wintour’s attention in 1997. She offered me a contract on the spot. I spent the following years on the jet-set party circuit capturing snaps of socialites and celebrities for Vogue. The job offered me a rare opportunity to create an anthropological study of high society at its most uninhibited.
In the same way I hope that my photographs will create a kind of short circuit in the viewer, an experience that will disrupt the familiar ways of perceiving things and therefore create uncertainty, confusion and a sense of bafflement over what is real and what completely constructed in the images. In short, I want to create disturbing, surprising and strange imagery with my photos, imagery that is simultaneously controlled and uncontrolled and forces you to feel and think.
It’s also been used in the activism world. It’s been used in a variety of protests and been part of time and change activism and that’s very important to me. And increasingly additionally been active in the art world in a variety of art contexts which I’m quite excited by.
It is the struggle flesh is heir to. Particularly female flesh! Aren't we all a paradoxical mix of these qualities? I always felt women needed to claim their right to equality not by being more like men, but by being fully themselves. The feminine qualities of being have been undermined for so long.
I saw these devices not only as objects for research but reflections in a way of the individuals these devices had interacted with over the years. The images function as stills life's but also as portraits of the Kinsey and their research subjects.
"In the production phase of this film, we were observing day by day about these subjects’ daily lives, we diligently followed their timetables, for example, this guy will wear this shirt today, and that lady will put on that dress tomorrow. In this restaurant, she is closer to this colleague, etc. Then I started to think about the relationship between the subjects and us."
It’s shock- ing to see how such a celebrated hero is seen as an incredible, idealistic leader. Meanwhile, on the other side of history, he is seen as a murderer. In my Utopia, I want to see a mythical leader from 360 degrees. I want to see how it was for the American, the Native, and for others.
Two of your pieces, Mr. Realistic (Keeping America Clean) (2014) and Builder Destroy (Acid God) (2013), depict a person inhabiting a trash covered, post-apocalyptic environment. Where did the idea for this world come from? Is it a version for our own world? Is it an omen for the way we mistreat our environment?
I was very concerned about what was outside of me. I struggled with many shades of shame and self worth. It was important for me to discover my own internal voice and filter of seeing the world. If we follow our history, passions, and/or interest it leads us to our authentic, one of kind voice and expression. There is no one like you, if you truly listen to what your soul is telling you.
Art is all about realizing and updating rituals in which mankind deals with their environment, the duty of the artist is to help realize but also to update the idea of realism itself. Children can rotate objects within a special field, when we grow old we lose this ability.
1. Your Aristocracy series shows private jets crashing as a thing of beauty. You create structure from chaos, order from disorder. Do you consider yourself a revolutionary?
I don’t think of myself in terms that have political connotations. I take photographs and do what I want – I try to say through a photograph the things I wish to express.
