Matter Out of Place (2006-08)

Matter Out of Place (2006-08)

whooshing up gold what
bay red green purple

Mounted digital C-prints, 30” x 30” and 30” x 40”

Matter Out of Place is a series of digital images that take on the appearance of microscopic, cosmic, and aerial mapping. The product of experiments with ordinary household products, they are created on my scanner and in my computer, first as chemical reactions and later as digital apparitions.

The term “matter out of place” is a definition of dirt used by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her classic work Purity and Danger. This project grows out of my interest in cultural notions of purity, cleanliness, and civilization that I first explored in the photographic series Spotless. In this series, the discrete exploded soap iconography referencing the body and its organs has mutated into more abstract patterns, creating tension between a striking beauty and the revelation of its artifice, the ordinariness of its representational ingredients. Through the visual seduction of pseudo-scientific imaging, I look for larger metaphors of disturbance and displacement both in our bodies and in the universe.