A Self Compassion
invented practices of self-witnessing
2006-2009
As I grew up I made art as my witness, to know that I was real.
I could express myself and my reality without too much detection and punishment. If my work was found, my mom would usually ruin it and punish me.
This is a collage I made as an assignment in Soheila Ghaussy’s class after seeing Germany Pale Mother.
It interweaves from two notes my mom wrote to me, one from when I went to summer camp as a kid, and one from when she found a drawing I made of myself with her vodka bottle as a teenager. She often left these hateful notes for me on the TV after she’d been drinking and I spoke out, but in this example I finally combined the two sides of her that were impossible to reconcile.
(This letter was recently put through EMDR, so new work to debut soon.)
This led to A Self Compassion, 2008-2009, a practice of suturing moments of my present and past selves together.
I spoke, sang, soothed, warned, shouted, screamed
a serially revised script to younger versions of myself projected to scale; .
I also tried retracing old writing and rematching old physiognomy, documented in video.
To complete it’s cycle at the time, the practice needed to move from the art school studio to the house where the memories were formed.
This resulted in the photographs of me interacting with sited projections.
I now think of it as a spatialized EMDR before I knew of the method.
Some similar past-self encountering scenes since then appear in Russian Doll, Claws, and Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry, and Almodovar’s Pain and Glory.
