Several years ago, I printed a photograph of my son wearing an army jacket onto a transparency sheet for overhead projectors, and taped it to a wall in my home. Over the weeks, the image curled away from the wall, and the light shining through the transparency created a 3 dimensional shadow on the surface. Friends would walk past, stop, and walk back to stare at this simple optical illusion. That one image birthed for me an entirely new way of art-making in dimensional photography.
The dimensional works are fabricated of acrylic, layered inside with polyester prints carefully manipulated to create a photograph that pops to life. When viewed in different alignments, the viewer is drawn in to a sort of ghost-world of snapshots.
In mothering and in art-making, I am constantly combing through memories, sifting through ashes in search of lost valuables. These are images of my own children, but they are also images of self, of projections and inner life. My mother coined the term Mother Vision to mean her sort of “second sight” used to observe me when I didn’t think anyone was watching. In my work, I photograph my kids unobserved, the images informed by what childhood means to me now that I have the benefit of retrospect: innocence, euphoria, fear, exploration, loss, and unconsciousness. I can’t look at them without referencing myself as both child and mother.
This is my mother vision.