from a distance  (2007)

This work started with an old copy of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying. I’d read and annotated the text at the age of seventeen, and seventeen years later revisited it.

The aim was to create a piece of work that dealt with both the failure of language and with its suggestive possibility. On the one hand its failure to adequately describe experience but also its ability to translate experience through narrative.

As I Lay Dying had a pronounced effect on me when I read it at seventeen as my reading of it coincided with a loss of language, an inability to speak and at times, write.

While the piece relates to my own experience it is not intended to be autobiographical. Rather my intention was to create something that appeared to be unified, but then fractured on closer inspection, though not completely. As such it is about language in a more generic sense, though it remains personal.

The image and text elements in “from a distance” are not supposed to sit comfortably, though often they may seem to relate to each other. The images are culled from Brownie annuals and are representations of an idealized and sanitized take on reality, at least from a distance.

Some, not all, the images have been manipulated. Additional elements have been added or parts of the scene have been removed. At times this is obvious though more often it may be difficult to tell. I wanted the images once in a while to undercut their own innocence, to dirty up the scene, but because this work relates in part to adolescence, to also retain a certain naivity.

This interplay of language and image should never rest with any one way of reading image/text, text/image. At least that was my intention. The viewing experience is designed to somehow equivocate my own realization of the disjuncture between language and experience. The grid is a foil, a promise of unity, unfulfilled.