Bubble & Squeak 2009
Bubble & Squeak
“My scripts are all Nneo-romantic
y teacher says I’m cynical
I say she’s a Lesbian.”
The series Bubble & Squeak, presented as a book containing 30 images of myself with different men in various situations, as well as different landscapes and texts. The men in the photographs are all strangers, whom I’ve invited to be photographed with me on the street. I later used a computer to place them against backgrounds, most of which I took myself before or during the work on the piece. Some of the landscapes were constructed from various fragments on the computer.
In these photographs, me and a man, meant to signify a father figure, stand embracing against backgrounds of changing landscapes. We are happy.
The scenes reflected in most of the photographs describe unreal moments and fantastic locations, places too good to be true and improbable at the same time. The viewer moves through a narrative whose beginning and end are one. The story does not develop; it is repetitive, and the images, too, repeat themselves, rather than contribute new information.
The work raises questions as to the relationships between me and the men who appear in the photographs with me. The multiplicity adds up and flattens the men into a prototype whose role in the story is ambiguous. I might be hinting at an Electra complex, or perhaps not…
Other questions emerge regarding the guiding principle of the image. On the one hand, the two of us as a couple: our posture, contact, clothes, and facial expressions. On the other hand, matching all these to the locale or background we are set against.
Some of the situations in the work seem natural, arbitrary, between here and there (snapshots), while other images represent an unlikely reality: radically cynical, ironic moments which exist on the seam line between reality and illusion, meant to subvert the viewer’s perception of reality.
“My scripts are all Nneo-romantic
y teacher says I’m cynical
I say she’s a Lesbian.”
The series Bubble & Squeak, presented as a book containing 30 images of myself with different men in various situations, as well as different landscapes and texts. The men in the photographs are all strangers, whom I’ve invited to be photographed with me on the street. I later used a computer to place them against backgrounds, most of which I took myself before or during the work on the piece. Some of the landscapes were constructed from various fragments on the computer.
In these photographs, me and a man, meant to signify a father figure, stand embracing against backgrounds of changing landscapes. We are happy.
The scenes reflected in most of the photographs describe unreal moments and fantastic locations, places too good to be true and improbable at the same time. The viewer moves through a narrative whose beginning and end are one. The story does not develop; it is repetitive, and the images, too, repeat themselves, rather than contribute new information.
The work raises questions as to the relationships between me and the men who appear in the photographs with me. The multiplicity adds up and flattens the men into a prototype whose role in the story is ambiguous. I might be hinting at an Electra complex, or perhaps not…
Other questions emerge regarding the guiding principle of the image. On the one hand, the two of us as a couple: our posture, contact, clothes, and facial expressions. On the other hand, matching all these to the locale or background we are set against.
Some of the situations in the work seem natural, arbitrary, between here and there (snapshots), while other images represent an unlikely reality: radically cynical, ironic moments which exist on the seam line between reality and illusion, meant to subvert the viewer’s perception of reality.