Commissioned by Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis (my alma mater), Unknown (American), by far the largest and most complicated piece I’ve ever made, took my work to new places technically, philosophically, and even logistically. Almost every component of this two-part installation, including the eight backlighting panels, had to be basically invented. But I’m fairly certain this represents the direction in which things will go from here.
In early 2023, I photographed a small, pensive 19th-century limestone bust of George Washington in the collection of Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the artist of which is not known and was therefore assigned the placeholder attribution “Unknown (American)” by the museum. Three of those photos, taken from different angles and in varied lighting, were in the case of the larger piece on the left converted into red, green, and blue tonal scales respectively, before being printed onto translucent plasticized paper and hand cut into 15mm-wide strips. The strips were then hand-woven into a composite image and backlit with the custom-built panels.
Despite his significance in history and American mythos (even serving as the namesake of the university), Washington’s likeness varies somewhat by portraitist and era. In this two-part installation, I wanted to draw attention to the special relationship enjoyed by portraiture and photography, as well as photography’s often-overlooked physical properties and lasting influence on the memory of events and individuals. While my work in general tries to examine fundamental questions about the nature of depiction, such as whether a portrait must have a subject, here this examination is applied to the portrayal, through photography, of an individual who lived before the invention of the medium itself.
To portray seems to be a deeply human need, and there exists in history a collective recollection of individuals and events based on such portrayals, which can be bent and manipulated by motley present-day political forces. As democracy’s potential fragility routinely makes headlines, and as the United States and other nations reconsider their historical legacies, this carries significant contemporary resonance. Given the centrality of portraiture’s role in the telling of history, and despite the unknowability inherent in photography, portraiture, and the passage of time itself, the Kemper Art Museum’s placeholder attribution might be seen as referring to the subject himself.
I will give an artist talk at the Sam Fox School October 5, 2023. More information on this to follow.
