Marked, 2018-2020
Analog & Digital Photographic Processes, Performance, Installation

Marked combines traditional photographic techniques with contemporary digital processes, performance, and sculpture. The title refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck, which has drawn verbal and physical abuse from strangers. Reproductions of the birthmark’s shape and color appear throughout the work. In Marked, I consider ways we are marked from birth, specifically through gender. Birthmarks are like political boundaries on a map, expressing the desire to include and exclude, to mark belonging through exclusion and differentiation. The work explores the parallels between patriarchal attempts to subjugate and exploit the land and the body. This is visualized through the demarcation of the birthmark to represent what is through what isn’t.

The landscape and the body are tropes represented through photographic surveys, and both raise questions of power, representation, and ideology. The American West’s photographic surveys sought to document, aestheticize, and colonize the lands and the bodies viewed through the camera’s lens. Photographs of the landscape and the body still carry this trace of privilege and propaganda. Marked responds critically to this history by examining the fraught relationship between the land and the body and their abstraction by both patriarchy and photography.