Behind the Lens 2020: Women in Photography
About: Grace Marie DeWitt
I use photography, videography, and drawing to redistribute agency and importance to discarded objects and materials. All of the objects I work with are the aftermath, detritus, and artifacts left over from unknowable actions and experiences. By documenting these objects, I attempt to recognize and connect to the past and future of that thing. I sympathize with materials as a way of piecing together my own ideas about existence, mortality, endurance, worship, perceptivity, vulnerability, emotional memory, worth, inevitability, interconnectedness, and humility.
I am moved by the residual kinship that humans share with the materials around them. After evolving from common matter, we now witness a geological epoch in which damage to this earth is irreversible. In a circumstance that forecasts demise for both living and nonliving things equally, I am compelled to believe that the connection of all things makes sense. I work in pursuit of a visual language for this interconnectivity: one which elevates materials beyond their relation to humans.
In the same way that a human’s experiences shape their personal mythology, how might the environments and interactions that an object experiences build a material mythology——a narrative of both life and death?
Artist Statement: soft bodies
The softbodies print series is named after Rosi Braidotti’s use of the term “bodies”––to describe objects and matter as vessels that withhold a certain perceptive energy, though unconscious and existing differently than animate things––and “soft,” a term used colloquially and sometimes derogatorily to acknowledge a person’s sensitive or highly emotional nature. In this series, I re-present images of disposable and discarded materials (often printed onto other, different or similar disposable materials) as an empathetic tool. The materials’ inevitable vulnerability, the way that their surfaces reveal their histories, is painful. I force the viewer to serve as witness to aftermath, and deprive her from knowing circumstance. In these pieces, both futile and frustrating, the only thing that is left is the “what.” There is never a “how,” or a “why.”
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