The Wilting Point
In 2019, I was invited to be part of In Tandem a collaborative project involving dancers, a poet, filmmaker, songwriters, photographer, and a writer. The writer’s short story The Wilting Point, about a child and her mother experiencing change in marginal circumstances, served as the subject to which each artist was to respond by producing a work relevant to the narrative themes, leading to a multi-media performance. While curating a photography show for the Tweed Museum of Art, I’d recently read Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology. The essays discussed how avant-garde artists challenged traditional photography aesthetics with forms of photo-collage, photomontage, and photograms. These forms reconceptualized the understanding of space itself as a subject by disrupting the sense of time and physical relationships normally presumed in still photographs. Inspired by the essays, I created contextual imagery in the form of photo-collages. These works were sourced with components from my own image archive. They were synced with the story and projected during the performance.