Category: Photography

New Project

As the days grow colder and dark, I find myself wrapped in melancholy.  It’s a similar dance I play year after year, one where I think I am learning about myself only to quickly forget everything I had learned.

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I am finding a loss in everything around me, including in myself, and I am realizing the importance of Feminism now more than ever.  I feel the Feminist Kill Joy resurfacing again and I welcome her with open arms.  I am tired of the self hatred, of the tip toeing around our mediocre men, I am tired of not loving myself and others openly and honestly and without shame. I am tired of hiding my own feelings to make life more comfortable for others. I am tired of being someone who I never really was meant to be.  My life is my own and I get to make the rules, don’t I?

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I am too young to be apologetic and ashamed of myself.

I am ready for me again.  (or at least this next version)

I am ready for my youth again.

I am ready for MY life again.

Perhaps this is the point–I will step back into my body, and find glory in myself and I encourage others to do the same, whatever that means for them.

I am currently working on a new project of portraits of women located in the mountain communities. The women don’t have to live in Frazier Park, but I want them to be located in this beautiful place. One to show off the area and also there is something transformative of this space & place. The women I have met here have all radically shaped and changed my life whether or not they realize it or not. It’s been a transformative six years that keeps on going. Every week I am excited and terrified about what I am going to learn/change about myself and I want to honor that in my favorite form of expression.

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I am literally inspired by women. From business to art to music. It’s always women.

It will always be women.

Living Life as a Dream

I always take up the opportunity to be able to shoot with Maddie Mae.  Maddie is the sister of my best friend Meredith so we all kind of grew up together.  I saw this awkward little girl blossom into this amazing goddess and shooting here is always so much fun.  We went down to one of my favorite urban locations, the arts district in downtown Los Angeles and produced some amazing works.

I was able to collab with Danielle Maree of @aqu.hair.ius and we made this stunning look.

 

12.6 An Art Show Experience

 

Digital life and self documentation has been part of my life since I was 13 years old.  For 15 years I have been meticulously documenting my life day by day on the internet.  Whether that be through detailed livejournal accounts of my rather boring days, my terrible poetry, or fangirl obsessions throughout the years, I am online. Are these parts that I allow others to look in, do they make up me?

Can identity and self understanding be limited by the digital world? Or is the digital a playground of sorts?

 

 

I am so interested in social media, not just professionally, as I help my clients tackle their social media goals, but also socially, personally, spiritually.  What does it mean to be on social media? Not only as an active participant to connect with others, but as someone who is interested in the ways that these sites make money off our digital bodies? I am a digital brand, I am my brand, and what does it mean to be engaged in that transaction when trying to *connect* with others? Can we have genuine connections online and be authentic in our digital bodies? As someone who participates in this weird self help online culture, where do the differences lie between what I project online and how my corporeal body experiences the world around itself?

 

These are the questions I went into when I did “I Have 12.6k Followers.”  It was inspired by a brief comment someone made to me when they saw how many followers I had on my social media,

“Oh Wow, you have 13,000 followers?” They were sincerely impressed (and a little jealous and confused).  I didn’t quite understand why anyone would actually care?

It was the Spark.

The Process

I have felt, for sometime, a complete seperation of identities.  I spent so much of my early  to mid twenties consumed in academia and having *those* kinds of conversations I forgot how to speak normally to people who haven’t read the same texts I had.  So, in order to make friends, I pushed this vast amount of knowledge down.  I secretly read philosophy and never talk about it to anyone in my community because I hadn’t found anyone who was slightly interested or knew what I was talking about.

I segmented my reality to fit into a new community.

After all how does one market themselves when we must limit our multiplicitous identity down to just a single 30 second soundbit?

How silly I was.

 

My MA work was largely on digital identity and the intersections of gaming culture, feminism and the military industrial complex.  I’m fascinated by performance studies and the playground that is the internet for identity. I love the idea of the interface theorized as an actual face & how perhaps Levinas was wrong, we do not understand ourselves once we see the other, perhaps now, we only understand ourselves through the eyes of others.  I am because you like me. I share what you like.

Like all good things in late capitalism we are consumers whose digital bodies have been consumed for advertisers.  Social Media begs us for authenticity when it is absolutely impossible to be vulnerable and authentic when your emotional core and vibrational being is counter to the algorithm.  The machine does not know how to process the reality of flesh and blood experience.  Instead of teaching the machines how to be more like us, we learn to be more like the machines & codes we create.

I train and teach people how to use instagram to reach their ideal client.  Running my own business, I spend a lot of time in the #ladyboss community, talking with other creative digital entrepreneurs.  When you spend so much time engaged in this business minded, money hustlers, boss bitch, community you start to become that community.

I found myself posting a lot of stupid motivational quotes that I didn’t really agree with, but they seemed to resonate w/ my community. In other words, I was becoming what the machine wanted me to become.

Fascinating! Now, I could have qued a nervous existential breakdown, but that is so 2016. Instead, I thought, there is art in this experience. A tongue and cheek exploration of my own experience.  Thus, the idea of the show was born.

I, being the nerd that I am, went back to my books first.  I reread A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Harraway, looked back on my notes on Judith Butler, spent a night with The Ways of Seeing, reconnected with my girl Laura Mulvey , explored the concepts of anxiety, amongst of  myriad  of other works that informed my decisions.

As a photographer who was undergoing a self imposed self portrait challenge, I knew I had to explore selfie culture & play homage to Cindy Sherman, set in the digital age.

I decided to explore digital identity and the limits of online motivational feminism through an art experience and party.

I took screenshots of motivational quotes that I found on pinterest and engaged in a photodialogue with them.

The Location

I knew the show had to be placed in my house.  If I was going to dialogue with this call to be authentic and vulnerable online, I couldn’t think of a place that was more honestly myself than my house. I wanted to open up my entire home for the show to embody that level of vulnerability. I’ve had parties before but rarely allowed people into my room or office or…those limitations would be broken down.  Be free, explore!  The photographic pieces were placed strategically throughout the house to encourage individuals to explore the nooks and corners of my home.  If they wanted to see every piece that I produced they had to explore in hidden areas in order to see everything.

I wanted the physical space to highlight that disconnect between digital identity and corporeal reality.

Before guests could enter the show, they had to strip themselves of their corporeal identity and enter into whatever digital identity that they wanted to explore that evening.  I provided followers with UV face paint, temporary tattoos, glitter and costumes that they could wear for the evening. I asked people to use different names for the evening.

 

I was Atra Ilta for the night (a call back to my teenage fangirl days), and it was great to meet everyone who walked through the doors.

I couldn’t help but place my show in the midsts of a party, after all, when do people snapchat, Instagram and Facebook their experiences the most if not while drinking amongst friends? “Look,” we say to the void, “Look how much fun I AM having while you’re watching from your screen.” As we disconnect from the moment to upload to the internet.  I am not totally cynical, I engage in these behaviors because at the end of the day they Are Fun. And we document our lives more so than ever. I’ve been documenting my life for the majority of the time I’ve been on this planet.

Placing the show within a party was to make it approachable for everyone who came, sometimes it can be so fucking awkward for non art weirdos to go to a show and not get it.  There is a sense of elitism that I wanted to dismantle from the experience.  I wanted to say, “You don’t have to get the references I’m making, you can just enjoy it and enjoy the party, enjoy the people.” I wanted to make the embodied reality of social media at the party, a place where people can connect and share an experience with people actually around them.

My living room was dedicated to fellow artists and creators to sell their goods. It was the bazaar, an etsy in real life.  My kitchen was the center of the party (as usual) we had gin and tonics (which is the perferred drinks of sociopaths), beer, wine, cider and food.  People really contributed to that part of the experience, bringing their own food and drinks to share.  That was awesome of everyone.

 

Back down a hallway away from everyone, was the selfie corner.  I wanted people to really understand how distancing selfie culture is.  It was a really cute corner though.

My bedroom was an exploration of how I portray my relationship online.  Most of my most engaging social media posts are about my husband and I’s relationship.  The year I got married was also the year I started my own business, graduated from my MA program and started co-teaching at UCSB.  No one cared about those posts they only cared that I was getting married.  Isn’t that interesting? Heteronormativity is still prioritized by the algorithm.

My bedroom was turned into a UV paradise, as people enterted into a deliciously blacklight room I hung glowing lanterns from the ceilings highlighting only the “good” moments we show people, but also, this is where most of my most explicit self portraits were shown. Nudes and more sexual images that I would never show to anyone.

 

Amongst all my overt vulnerability was the introvert chill out corner, people could glow under the black light and lay on pillows and beds and blankets and people had amazing conversations down there.  Really profound conversations & often times hilarious ones.

On the third story I converted the guest bedroom into a room filled from head to toe with string lights.  They were meant to represent the digital distractions in a relationship and how often we lay next to our partner in our bed on our phones.  The goal was to get to the bed.  Often times followers would get to the bed and just lay there on their phones.  It delighted me to no end.

My office was left sterile, after all, that is the place in my house where I create my digital identity and the digital identities of others.  It had to look commercial.

The projector room played a video that looked at my entire online history and showcased some of the work I’ve never showed anyone before, me playing drums, my music and these strange videos I used to post online when I was a teenager lip syncing along to other songs.  It was dark and projected on my entire wall. It was meant to be the same kind of experience we have when we just get lost in front of our computer screen.

 

The Reception

At the end when the party was dying down I went around and asked people about their experience and it became very clear that the experience turned into a whole new experience for those who came.  It became an experience where people could just be themselves.  One of my friends came up to me and said, “Tori what I love about this is, I didn’t have to come in and be John the Truck driver I could just be John.” Isn’t that incredible? It was a space where people felt that they could truly and totally be themselves.

The show became a space where people could be their authentic selves without fear of judgement, where everyone got along, share ideas, take pictures together and experience something together.  Everything that social media is suppose to offer us, but due to it’s limitations can not and will never offer us.

Our corporeal selves were able to be our digital bodies in a flesh and bone reality.

It became clear to me the need for more art community spaces in my rural area.  The need for more art experiences where people could experiment, create events and explore whatever their inner creative guide needed to express.

The pictures in this post were not taken by me, but where taken by others.  After all, the show is what others see it to be.

I am currently working on a group art experiences set for the Autumn Equinox within the woods at the base of Mt. Pinos.  Look for information on this coming in the next couple weeks.  Or contact me.

 

 

Projection with Steph Darling

I have incredibly talented friends. Stephanie Darling is no different.  As a local artist of Frazier Park, right here in California,  her story and art has always captivated me.  She was born and raised in the area, not only that she has so much incredible family history to the place, to the land, to the community. It is embedded in her bones and ever apparent in her art work.  Her story, her art, has always fascinated me because it is so different than my own.

I’m first generation on my moms side, and second generation on my father’s.  We don’t have deep roots in this country, let alone one place.  The fact that Steph can trace her family back not only in geneolgy, but geology, in land. NOW THAT IS FREAKING COOL. It is such a beautiful symbiosis between human history and the land, both taking care of one another.

Her paintings are so personal to herself, and this land that as an onlooker you want to know more.  And despite the locality of the work they’re incredibly universal to female expression and embodiment.  I’m a totally obsessed fan girl.

I contacted her last year to see if she wanted to take some of her work and project them around town and I’d photograph the experience.  We thought it’d be an amazingly fun way for us to create something during the colder months as well as try to see how her works transform and adapt presented in another setting.  We thought onlookers would be interested (We were wrong), but we were totally in love with how much they changed depending on the location.

Here are some of the images below.

 

 

You can find more about the amazing Stephanie Darling over at her website at http://stephdarling.org/Tattoos.html 

She’s an amazing tattoo artist as well (may be biased, as I have lots of work done by her).

Looking at these pictures, it would be fun to retake them as the land has changed drastically.  The community pond at the park no longer has water in it, the reeds are low and brittle.  The building is now grey instead of pink and as we enter into spring, the oak trees will be filled with leaves, which will give better surface area to project the pictures onto.

That’s what I love about this process, we can always revisit.

Letting Go of Perfectionism: Photography

One of the most valuable lessons I learned last year was the importance of continual creation. As a photographer, I would think that the conditions were not correct & therefore, I’d abandon the project. I was so obsessed with making exactly what I envisioned that I often wouldn’t even attempt because OMG I AM A PERFECTIONIST INFJ PROBLEMS.  I soon came to realize, creating something exactly that I picture in my head is foolish and impossible.  For one, my head has no budget, For two, it’s in my head so there is no limits to the reality around us. What I try to do instead was enter into each creative session with instead an IMAGE I wanted to capture, a FEELING I wanted to create, express, etc.

That’s not to say, I didn’t try to get that image I envisioned, but I didn’t let the inability to capture exactly what I wanted to stop me from creating.

At the end of the day, you’ll fail a lot, but sometimes, you’ll leave a session getting something completely unexpected and totally awesome.

That to me now, has been more important than ever and has allowed me to let go of the limiting emotions behind perfectionism.  When you really think about perfectionism, it is a fear of failure.  If you let go of that, you’re down to create whatever.  Sure it’s scary, everything around is fucking terrifying, but what’s great is you’ll learn what you like to shoot, when you like to shoot and how you like to shoot as an artist that way.  Some of my favorite images are technical failures. But they capture an emotion or express a feeling I am unable to do in words & for me that’s more important than technical perfection.

 

 

My creative outlook for 2017 will be this: shoot a creative/stylized shoot once a month.  One that isn’t about money or publication. One that is about me, my creative voice and aesthetically, what gets my socks off. Create things I like and be comfortable in what I like. For instance, it was suggested to me that I shoot men. I have no interest in shooting men as my main focus. I prefer photographing women. We are much more visually interesting in my opinion, and I love overt femininity. It’s okay to listen to people’s suggestions, but do your own thing. Have courage in your truth.

Finding your “creative voice’ is a continual process, and for me, I am constantly working on figuring out what that means.  I challenge you to create on a regular basis.