| girl before a mirror is an archive of
black and white self-portraits amassed over about 7 years. The archive
contains 1585 items, and is comprised of, firstly, a set of file cards
and secondly, a searchable website/database. Each image has been catalogued
according to a personal system that denotes the city in which the image
was made, the series number in that city, the chronological frame number
of the image (i.e. the image number in the series), the physical frame
number (i.e. that which appears on the negative), and a designation of
the year during which the image was made. A descriptor of the contents
of each image has been written, and also appears on the file card.
girl before a mirror was created out of a practice of control and worry in relation to my position as a woman who grapples with a disconcerting sense of being constantly on view. I have come to understand my self-portraiture as a visual means of self-conscious probing into my experiences as a person who worries. My worries manifest themselves in activities geared toward achieving personal control, and conversely, my feelings of personal control and self-control manifest and express themselves through active worrying. This quandary – where worry leads to control and where control leads to worry – is the basis for my artwork. The form of the archive has special importance in relation to photography. Photography has long been paired with data, particularly in the creation of the culture of surveillance we live in today. Beginning with Francis Galton's composite photography in identifying criminal, psychological and racial types, and with Alphonse Bertillon's combinations of mugshots, physiognomic measurements, and statistical data, the photographic archive has played no impartial role in defining concepts of 'normality' and 'deviancy.' I am particularly moved by the multiple effects of the photographic archive to create firstly, a culture of people seen, and secondly, a culture of seeing people. We are ideologically defined, in this sense, by what we learn we are not, through our ability to look, identify and disavow. girl before a mirror is a self-paradigm
to-be-looked-at, to appropriate Laura Mulvey's phrase. Within the gallery,
it is not me [in the moment, embodied] who is surveilled, but this alternate
paradigm. In this way, I achieve a degree of [ideologically fantastical]
control over who looks at me, when, and how. Even more exciting, to me,
is my ability track which pages on my website are viewed and what searches
are conducted, through access to Netscape's History folder and the web-server's
logs. These viewing mechanisms permit me to monitor (surveill) operators
who are specifically monitoring (surveilling) and controlling (surveilling)
my own systems of self-surveillance.
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