Opening Reception: Friday, April 16, 2010 from 5-7 PM Spiritualism in the late 19th and early 20th century used the medium of the body to communicate with other worldly presences. ‘You Are My Favorite Photograph’ is a show which mimics of the practice of spiritualism to reinvigorate the bridging between worlds unseen and seen.
I use the physical body to translate people’s descriptions of their favorite photographs during a night of sleep. I place the unexposed photo paper underneath my sheets, and sleep with the intent of being the transmitter for their description of a favorite photograph. I then develop the paper the next day to reveal the presence/absence as articulated by exposed/unexposed portions of the paper.
Spiritual mediums acted as bridges between the existing world and the person who had passed away. The photograph was proof positive that the spirit has passed through the body, been translated by another worldly presence and became material again. This is an intriguing way of subverting the ‘truth factor’ of photography to yield a tenuous bind between the image and the after-world. In the case of my own project, I am proposing to re-enact the relationship between memory and object in a contemporary context.
In the process of being the medium for ‘You are My Favorite Photograph’ I have developed a ritual of collecting written memories from people of their favorite images. I then proceed to sleep on photo paper and the written description, waking in the morning and moving the paper from under the sheet to a light tight container. These documents are then developed, revealing various degrees of light that touched the photo paper over the course of a night. The wrinkles and creases are part of the work, as well as the variations in black and white, which occur from night to night. It becomes impossible not to search for forms and reasons for the random imprint of body and light on paper. The work is presented as a grid, unframed, so that the viewer can see the marks of the body.
I am drawn to photography’s changeable relationship to documentation of fact, as it mimics our own desire and disillusionment in the quest for tangible and real experience. I am particularly interested in the absurdity, belief and intensity that yielded these early photographs. Photography became the evidential seam between the worlds, the body was the form through which the energy passed. The marks or traces that are left are an imprint of the desire of nostalgia.
—Sheilah Wilson
