corinne de san jose

Push/Pull (2018)

 

Push/Pull is a series of cameraless photographs, where torn and crumpled pages from pornographic magazines from the 1980s and 1990s are assembled with three dimensional objects on top of a flatbed scanner. A moving light source follows the movement of the scanner head. Inspired by the early days of abstract expressionism, when the mere act of moving the canvas from vertical to horizontal to make a painting was novel, that the performative aspect of using paint streaks and drips captured something new. The work hopes to find a dialogue between various dichotomies. For the photograph is treated as both a two and three dimensional object, a still life and a collage, stagnant but performative. And then there is the images of pornographic body parts on the crumpled paper, juxtaposed with objects commonly associated with the feminine, homely, demure. And while pornography (specially of that era) is a perspective of a woman through the male gaze, would the images then be a subversion of that?