2017 / I’ve Got You Under My Skin
        
Using a wedding photo album -purchased in a yard sale- as the basis of my work, imparts a universal quality to my intention.
This album with no identity could tell the story of absolutely anyone and everybody and is the deeply sad evidence of a failed relationship.
Aiming to challenge the relationship we have to photography as visual documentation of a fact, I distort the information the image gives away and the keys we have to analyse it. Using the negative layer of the image symbolically turns the story upside down, highlights its dark aspect and darkens its light.
This switch of elements of light take greater resonance in such a holy setting that is a wedding.Typical immoderate display and staged representation of love, the whole ceremony is widely photographed, freezing on paper the climax of relationship commitment.
Though we tend to over document and overexpose our lives, images are the tip of the iceberg from our stories. The surface we decide to show off.
By the use of Braille, I intend to bring another layer of information to the image. Both informative and disruptive, this element emphasize the various reading degrees we can have of a picture while symbolizing scars and wounds, by the agression of the paper’s surface.
Now visible, these scars relate another story, darker, sadder, unknown and so far, unseen.With almost endless interpretation, the input of braille on these pictures can illustrate our facility to overlook things we see, our difficulties to comprehend relationships, or even looking away from an abusive relationship.
Far from a dramatic statement, I intend to keep a playful tone in my work, and could sum up this piece by tackling the idiotic adage « Love is blind ».
Could we then love what we don’t see? Do we love by lack of knowledge?
In this work, a sighted audience has several keys of reading which assembled together produce a fussy image, while a blind audience only has one, extremely clear, revealing a completely different story. Under the fingers appears parts of some of the saddest love songs of the Blues. Blues that can find an echo in the significant presence of the color blue in the images.