emily

Mom.

Paula's.

Ray.

Character?

Jerry.

Ligonier, PA

Megan, Fall 2009

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten. "

-Milan Kundera

Whatever Works

"Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself. Because its by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck than you'd like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your fathers one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you. Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack. "

-Whatever Works.

Artist Statement for Project #1

Deficient Relations is a group of work that speaks of my belief that one person can never fully know another, or even themselves. One’s identity cannot be described simply by what they like, what they wear, what they do etc, but it is their inner core – something that is indescribable. In these pictures I’ve created barriers between the subject and myself. The identities of the subjects are a mystery to the viewer, often faceless and always nameless.

Plato states in his Symposium that people were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. This brings us to the widespread belief that soulmates exist; that there is one person in the world who will complete another. If this is true, then we must not think of ourselves as a whole being, and one’s identity can only be realized once they have found this missing piece. Though, if we cannot recognize our own identity, how could it be possible to recognize the missing part of it, and for that matter anyone else’s?