Closeness is a display as much as an affect. For a couple or family, to show closeness is to present a narrative of happiness to the world. The photo album is the ultimate record of this performance, which is then made legible to others. But there is always a possibility that the album is a cover-up for what is really managed distance and, at best, peripheral interaction. These pictures look like ordinary shots at first glance. On closer inspection it becomes clear that the language of family photographs is being disrupted and a previously invisible space opens itself for enquiry.
Closeness is as much a display as it is an affect. For a married couple or family, to show closeness is to present a narrative of happiness to the world, to validate its own existence. The photo album is the ultimate record of this performance, which is also made legible to others - in certain contexts it is even required as proof that a relationship is not fake. We are told that these ‘central relationships’ are the source and site of happiness, yet at the same time we know that closeness is not guaranteed. People stay together for all sorts of reasons, and there is always a possibility that the album is merely a cover-up for what is really managed distance and, at best, peripheral interaction.
Pictures from this series look like ordinary family shots at first glance. However on closer inspection it becomes clear that they are somehow off: positioning of the subjects seems awkward, and there is a partial arm or another body part extending into and from the other side of the picture. These are based on found pictures of a family that have been rephotographed or otherwise copied, and then reworked. The ‘Offest’ command is used to shift the image to separate the figures, and the number of pixels is recorded. The background is then blended back in, but the bodies are left to wrap around the edges. With the figures so spliced, the language of family photographs is disrupted and a previously invisible space opens itself for enquiry.
I display these alongside a series of works on paper based on a wider pool of images. They too are first offset, and then I reproduce the space between the figures in glossy black household paint. The emotional distance is thus rendered palpable, the odd forms resembling crumbling pillars or in any case something badly misshapen. A sample pairing is included in the submission. (It must be noted that they are not fixed pairs, and I envisage them in a looser non-linear hang.)