Figure Studies

Red Grass

Jorie Graham, "On Difficulty"

It's that they want to know whose they are,
seen from above in the half burnt-out half blossomed-out
woods, late April, unsure as to whether to
turn back.
The woods are not their home.
The blossoming is not their home. Whatever's back there
is not. Something floats in the air all round them
as if it were the place
where the day drowns,
and the place at the edge of cries, for instance, that fissure, gleams.
Now he's holding his hand out.
Is there a hollow she's the shape of?
And in their temples a thrumming like
what-have-I-done?-- but not yet a question, really, not
yet what slips free of he voice to float like a brackish foam
on emptiness--
Oh you will come to it, you two down there
where the vines begin, you will come to it,
the thing towards which you reason, the place where the flotsam
of the meanings is put down
and the shore
holds. They're thinking
how low the bushes are, after all, how finite
the options one finds in the
waiting (after all). More like the branchings of whiteness
always stopping short into this shade or that,
breaking inertia then stopping,
breaking the current at last into shape but then
stopping--
If you asked them, where they first find the edges of each other's bodies, where
happiness resides they'd look up through the gap
in the greenery you're looking down through.
What they want to know-- the icons silent in the shut church (to the left),
the distance silent in the view (to the right)--
is how to give themselves away,
which is why they look up now,
which is why they'll touch each other now (for your
looking), which is why they want to know what this
reminds you of
looking up, reaching each other for you to see, for you to see by, the long
sleep
beginning, the long sleep of resemblance,
touching each other further for you that Eternity begin, there, between you,
letting the short jabs of grass hold them up for you to count by,
to color the scene into the believable by,
letting the thousands of individual blossoms add up
and almost (touching her further) block your view of them--
When you look away
who will they be dear god and what?

Night Masks

I saw, utterly,

this life.
I’d put it on.
I’d wear it like

--a crown, for
how it flashes.


-Carl Phillips, “Regalia Figure”


In creating a series of masked portraits, I am interested in the subverting the portrait genre’s privileging of the human face as a site of meaning and essential individuality. I covered the body with the clutter of a cultural landscape that is messy, consumptive, dispeopled. In this way, fragile notions of individual identity are eclipsed by the rituals of meaning-making that surround the production and consumption of everyday objects. I hope to reveal our relationship to the material world as a complex, fetishistic, emotional, and ritual phenomenon that is deeply embedded in our lived experience. This project is a serial rephrasing of the disjunction between the enduring myth of the individual and the enlivened material landscape.

Senior Show at Oberlin College, Spring 2011

The Backseat

Cosmic Ghost

The Infield

Another Haircut

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

The Dance, Part II

Late Sunday Morning

"[...]Their heads and their glances collected toward a common center, and restored, and they sang us another, a slow one this time; I had a feeling, through their silence before entering it, that it was their favorite and their particular pride; the tenor lifted out his voice alone in a long, plorative line that hung like fire on heaven, or whistle's echo, sinking, sunken, along descents of a modality I had not heard before, and sank along the arms and breast of the bass as might a body sunken from a cross; and the baritone lifted a long black line of comment; and they ran in a long and slow motion and convolution of rolling as at the bottom of a stormy sea, voice meeting voice as ships in dream, retreated, met once more, much woven, digression and returns of time, quite tuneless, the bass, over and over, approaching, drooping, the same declivity, the baritone taking over, a sort of metacenter, murmuring along monotones between major and minor, nor in any determinable key, the tenor winding upward like a horn, a wire, the flight of a bird, almost into full declamation, then failing it, silencing; at length enlarging, the others lifting, now, alone, lone, and largely, questioning, alone and not sustained, in the middle of space, stopped; and now resumed, sunken upon the bosom of the bass, the head declined; both muted, droned, the baritone makes his comment, unresolved, that is a question, all on one note; and they are quiet, and do not look at us nor at anything."

James Agee, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941

Bob Mizer

Soldier and Sailor, 1971

Tony Farrell and Jim Lee (Kissing Rocks), 1971

Kurt Koenig, 1971

Unknown (Jumping) 1973

Sleeper

from the wikipedia page on stereoscopy

From Vertigo

heads turn like perfect worlds

Carl Phillips, X

Several hours past that
of knife and fork

laid across one another
to say done, X

is still for the loose
stitch of beginners,

the newlywed
grinding next door

that says no one
but you, the pucker

of lips only, not yet
the wounds those lips

may be drawn to. X,
as in variable,

anyone's body, any set
of conditions, your

body scaling whatever
fence of chain-metal Xs

desire throws up, what
your spreadeagled limbs

suggest, falling, and
now, after. X, not

just for where in my
life you've landed,

but here too, where
your ass begins its

half-shy, half-weary
dividing, where I

sometimes lay my head
like a flower, and

think I mean something
by it. X is all I keep

meaning to cross out.

Whites

The Year in Backs