Elizabeth Raymer Griffin
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Work from Tacking, Rigging, and Weighting and Lifejackets. All prints are 4×5 contact prints (or several of them).
Check out her video collaboration with Matt Griffin.
“I am concerned with breaking patterns. In my work, I explore personal pathologies, both inherited and invented. I spend a tremendous amount of time analyzing my motivations, tendencies, and weaknesses. Self-portraiture is a therapeutic self-examination where I play-out the process of struggling to live my life without abnormal levels of guilt, anxiety, and fear. I photograph myself as various internal characters to act out psychological meanderings, memories, intrinsic dramas and attempts at personal growth and change. I have always been aware of and reliant on the intuitive power of the self-portrait to reveal and influence my behaviors.
Many of the evocative props are tied to the interests-turned obsessions of my grandmother (collecting, but not using, sewing materials), my father (building a fully functional wooden sailboat, but never sailing it) and me (making thousands of self-portraits, most of which are kept to myself). I am attempting to make connections between our common temperaments and tendencies. Through my photographs I am trying to understand and harness these symbols of a creative life unfulfilled: a boat that lies like a rotting carcass in a shed, a stack of patterns, fabrics, and buttons in a corner of a damp basement and boxes upon boxes of unseen photographic performances.”