RIFE MACHINE

A series of (de)constructed portraits, RIFE MACHINE uses pictures to pull people apart and rebuild them. Press them into new places; test their elasticity - photographs as a magnifying glass, a bandage, a graft, a knife. Each work in this selection of images from RIFE MACHINE melts, scales, wraps and crusts the body plane and the picture plane together- building intimate sites of participation and control. Sites where siblings, friends, family and lovers relinquish power, and through the process of being photographed participate in obscure enactments of dreams, rituals and rites of passage. Thousands of 6×4 photographic patches of skin cocoon my younger brother’s fishing boat in a scabbed human shell; keyhole camera images of my own removed fallopian tubes become a ceremonious suit in a homemade womb, making my body whole again; a face of an old teacher becomes my private dance space. Bodies are brought together violently and sensually in one plane of reality, without ever really touching or harming each other in another. Fantasy and reality (my own and others') are pasted on top of one another, creating mashed images that are visual manifestations of the physical, emotional and psychological spaces between people. RIFE MACHINE is a search for a way of feeling that swims between real and unreal, domestic and dream. RIFE MACHINE exhibition presented at ACE ACROSS Gallery in 2017 Bus Projects Gallery in 2018