encarnado: embodied
Archival pigment prints on Epson Hot Press Bright at 20” x 30” and 33” x 40”. In progress.
I have always been fascinated by the power of photography to record and reinterpret what is both absent and present, and have created images that re-construct what was once there but no longer exists. My current work encarnado: embodied re-visits this fascination in Mexico, with a body of work made in San Miguel de Allende’s Rastro Municipal.
As I photographed in San Miguel de Allende’s slaughterhouse, I was faced with the body at its most elemental. In a surprising intertwining of flesh, both human and animal, I was drawn into this sensory-charged space where both the fury and the fragility of life permeated the air. I set out to understand the strange mixture of repulsion and attraction, terror and power. Perhaps I could create an image that honed the sensorial onslaught into an offering.
encarnado: embodied is a testament to that search. The boundaries between predator and prey, sustenance and deprivation, body and spirit, subject and object become porous as I confront the visceral. What’s left alludes to the complicated and violent order of things, in the liminal space linking life and death.
