HAIR TRIGGER
Before the prevalent
use of photography by the public, the trading of locks of hair between
lovers, friends and family was a common memento. Locks of hair were
pressed between pieces of glass or made into intricate jewelry during the
seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Hair was also collected from family members and formed into
individual leaf and flower shapes, arranged in a wreath or bouquet, and
displayed in a glass shadow box as an equivalent of a family portrait.
Reconnecting to this
bygone cultural practice, I employ the post-modern technique of
recontextualizing this practice in our current era, further extending the
connection between the medium of hair and the ideas of sentimentality and
identity.
In this body of work I
exploit the many meanings our contemporary culture associates with hair.
Through sculptures made from hair flowing from drainage pipes in
the installation titled “Underground” I explore our repressed
commonality. Our personal
waste is hidden in so many ways, yet collected in common repositories.
The result of this marginalized collective activity is exposed in
this installation as it brings one into a space where the debris has been
made visible.
Other sculptural
pieces in this exhibit consist of bars of soap which appear to be growing
hair, blurring a number of dichotomies closely associated with our
identity such as the animate and the inanimate, disgust and playfulness,
as well as cleanliness and uncleanliness.
Cibachrome photographs
of hair blown up and magnified into huge organic forms bring to mind
microscopic life forms, our biological identity embodied in DNA, as well
as a simply pleasing abstract design.
Two dimensional pieces
consisting of hair pressed between two pieces of glass shaped into
individual manes of hair highlights how what we hold as so personal in our
style, when abstracted from the person becomes seemingly formulaic. A
number of other two-dimensional pieces that contain circles made from hair
confuse the issue of private sentimentality, with the impersonality of
cataloguing the hair as well as seducing the viewer into forgetting the
personal meaning of the circles and viewing the work as abstract design.
The concepts presented
in this show provoke the viewers to address these dichotomies and thus
their own identities.
