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Description
caption: Julia often retreats into her imagination

from the series:
This Is Not Your Life
a fictional retrospective of an imagined childhood
2006-2009
currently exhibiting at Ryerson Gallery, Toronto

I have only a few images of myself as a child, and in most I’m photographed forcing a smile, holding the corners of my mouth apart with my fingers in an absurd rictus grin. I see in them the same performance I have given for as long as I can remember.

This Is Not Your Life is an altered photographic history; through manipulation of appropriated images, a forgery of the quintessential happy childhood is created. Photographs of small children collected through various means, are transformed. I replace in each image the head of a child with my own, clipped from a photo taken at my fifth birthday party. My understanding of photography, light, shadow and texture, as well as photographic intertextuality, enables me to render believable historical alterations.

The photograph from my birthday party is, in my memory of that time, and even now, the only image that I recognize as myself; I stood awkwardly, sullen and shy. Disconnection is dominant theme in my work; subsequent to being clinically diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I’ve been exploring, in recent bodies of work, aspects of the depersonalization symptomatic to the condition. At times I find myself in disassociative states in which I can’t connect to my own life, history or even my name beyond acknowledging that I should be able to. This coping mechanism effectively cuts me off from the intense emotions associated with traumatic memory and allows me to function daily.

It was during one of these fugues that I initially began this exploration. Initially it was a subconscious choice to use the birthday photograph to work from, only later realizing that when estranged from myself physically, it’s the child body I revert to, tiny, withdrawn and afraid. This is when the abuse that largely caused the traumatic stress began, and so it’s from this photograph that reality splinters into make believe. In each subsequent construction the same face repeats, forcing my neurosis onto scenes of innocence and happiness.
Captions dispassionately narrate the story of my life actual, equal weight given to the banal and horrible; image and prose interplay as fantasy versus reality.
This series is both a confrontation of the performance of a normal childhood, as well as an examination of the disassociation I relied on to survive.

Description
caption: Julia often retreats into her imagination

from the series:
This Is Not Your Life
a fictional retrospective of an imagined childhood
2006-2009
currently exhibiting at Ryerson Gallery, Toronto

I have only a few images of myself as a child, and in most I’m photographed forcing a smile, holding the corners of my mouth apart with my fingers in an absurd rictus grin. I see in them the same performance I have given for as long as I can remember.

This Is Not Your Life is an altered photographic history; through manipulation of appropriated images, a forgery of the quintessential happy childhood is created. Photographs of small children collected through various means, are transformed. I replace in each image the head of a child with my own, clipped from a photo taken at my fifth birthday party. My understanding of photography, light, shadow and texture, as well as photographic intertextuality, enables me to render believable historical alterations.

The photograph from my birthday party is, in my memory of that time, and even now, the only image that I recognize as myself; I stood awkwardly, sullen and shy. Disconnection is dominant theme in my work; subsequent to being clinically diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I’ve been exploring, in recent bodies of work, aspects of the depersonalization symptomatic to the condition. At times I find myself in disassociative states in which I can’t connect to my own life, history or even my name beyond acknowledging that I should be able to. This coping mechanism effectively cuts me off from the intense emotions associated with traumatic memory and allows me to function daily.

It was during one of these fugues that I initially began this exploration. Initially it was a subconscious choice to use the birthday photograph to work from, only later realizing that when estranged from myself physically, it’s the child body I revert to, tiny, withdrawn and afraid. This is when the abuse that largely caused the traumatic stress began, and so it’s from this photograph that reality splinters into make believe. In each subsequent construction the same face repeats, forcing my neurosis onto scenes of innocence and happiness.
Captions dispassionately narrate the story of my life actual, equal weight given to the banal and horrible; image and prose interplay as fantasy versus reality.
This series is both a confrontation of the performance of a normal childhood, as well as an examination of the disassociation I relied on to survive.