RIFE MACHINE

In RIFE MACHINE, I am using 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. I am interested in evoking a sense of confusion about where the body begins, where the image starts, where the space is. I do this as an attempt to find alternate ways to tell stories with and about people through/on/inside and underneath pictures. The structure of the body and our use of it is changing, evolving, and in my work I am determined to depict images and technology as being physically intertwined and confused with bodily and domestic experiences. 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.