(RE)PLAYING MYSELF 2024–
This series consists of projected scans of childhood film photos, with me physically re-placing (to re-play) myself into these projected images. The resulting photographs oscillate between the grotesque and the comically plausible: school portraits, family snapshots, and probing, intimate images my parents took of me playing dress-up or in costume. All selected images date from before 2006, before puberty. What does it mean to re-inhabit my girlhood body as an adult? What does it mean for my naked chest—“explicit” in adulthood—to serve as the surface upon which my prepubescent chest is projected?
Why this impulse to replay and replace myself?
The primary text informing this work is bell hooks’ All About Love (1999), specifically Chapter 1, which explores the messages children receive about love, abuse, and power. As hooks writes, “children learn early on to question the meaning of love, to yearn for love even as they doubt it exists.” These images, at first glance, appear as mundane documentation of childhood—clothes I recognize, events stamped in time. Yet, they hold the hidden dynamics of family and community: the unspoken, the actions-yet-to-come, the emotional and physical incest embedded in memory.
In the years after these photos were taken, as I “became a woman” through puberty and a changing body, the bright but misunderstood child with undiagnosed autism—desperately yearning to be accepted by other girls—turned into a teenager seeking drugs, attention, survival. The camera accompanied me as it always has, but in this series, what is not shown becomes paramount.
I grew up in a family where there was always a camera. Neither of my parents were artists, but they sought to document, to remember, to imprint. In this series, I am entirely dependent on others to take the photos—both the photos of my past and those of the present. I am, as I was in childhood, not the photographer but the photographed: the subject-object in the plane of vision.
Are cameras better off in the hands of non-photographers? Am I trying to shield my younger self from being photographed? Or am I a martyr screaming, Take me instead—you don’t want her!?
What fantasies make the “girl” a “woman,” and which make her a “girl” again? Both John Berger’s (Ways of Seeing, 1972) theories on nakedness versus nudity and Peggy Phelan’s (Unmarked, 1993) notion of impossibility as the maintenance of desire inform the sexed aspects of this work. As a non-binary person marked by “womanhood,” what does it mean to play the girl?
My nakedness differs from that of a man’s bare chest: my breasts sexualize the image of a 4-year-old me. In a pornographic twist, exposing my adult chest to the camera simultaneously reveals my child-self’s chest to the world. Where is the line between child and sex object, between girl and woman? By putting myself back into these images, am I exposing my younger self to more than she’s already endured?