Madison Jones

This series consists of seven photos of my own body taken through mirrors in order to experience a new perspective. The process of viewing/knowing creates the effect of figuratively dismembering the body. Each subject passed through between one and four mirrors until I was able to capture the limb clearly. The photos were taken while alone as an intimate moment with myself and the separate pieces of my body.

The deconstructed body is obstructed because of its dismemberment. The more mirrors each body part passed though, the more diluted each photo eventually became. I will never be able to see the different areas of my body from another perspective; therefore, this diluted, and inherently obstructed view is the closest I can get to seeing myself.

The photos are arranged between two bridges and attached to strings that connect the bridges. The arrangement plays with the intimacy of the images by playing with the individual pieces. Each piece of the body makes up the whole, and each piece is vital and important in seeing the whole, just as each note is vital to an entire melody. The photos are evidence of a visceral conversation I am having with my own body.

This series started as a fascination with instant film. As objects they are extremely complex yet are rendered invisible and simple by their very structure. There are many layers of chemicals and different physical components of the film that make it work. I wanted to see them all. I wanted to see how affecting the layers affected the image of the photographs. The first thing I did with the photos was to peel off the white coverings and wash the chemicals off the back. The chemicals began to wash away and revealed a brilliant green, however it didn’t change the content of the photo at all. After washing the prints, I began to manipulate them in multiple destructive ways. The prints were bathed, painted, sanded -removing layers of chemicals, all the way through the image in some places.

The process of destroying and obstructing the images made me think about the subject in general. Was it actually important? What is the meaning of a photo with no discernable image? Do the small pieces of missing image lead to anything? Are they spots in my vision or missing parts? The obstruction and destruction of the image became more important than the actual content. The destruction, the physical intervention, becomes the content. After removing any trace of the recognizable, I found that the back of the photo was interesting, not the front. The tiny images were scanned and blown up in order to further obstruct and obscure the original image. The massive scale shifts the viewers' thinking from traditional photography and harkens to paintings or murals. These images become abstract because of their flimsy connection to the physical world. With the content bearing portion of the photo removed, the viewer is left only with the framework.

Sunk but Sinking is a series of triptychs that deconstructs each physical layer of instant film. The film is peeled apart into two separate layers and then scanned like negative film to accentuate parts of their transparency. The first image in the triptych is the original negative film scan, the second is the back layer of film, and the third image is the color that the images possess.

Each single image is methodically taken apart and dissected so we can see the physical layers within. All three of these components must be recombined to create the original image. This is, however, an impossibility and the consolidation must ultimately occur in the mind’s eye. The original photos consisted of dismembered self portraits that never came together to create a full image of the body. Each part of the triptych is one vital piece of the whole, but they will never come together in order to make the complete image again, always existing separately.

Blind Spots is a series of photos mounted in light boxes. They are taken with a macro lens and highly chromatic lighting in order to push the content further. The images are folded, ripped, and all together modified contact lenses. The photos were printed on a transparent paper and installed in light boxes in order to highlight their transparency and the general concept of sight and how our eyes function.

This work is conceived from my own rapidly decaying vision. I am entranced with how the eye works and how something as simple as contacts can help us see. The boxes are small, only 5x7, and they are installed with jeweler’s loupe next to them. The viewer is to get up close and personal, almost blinding yourself in the process as you try to find all the hidden details.Scratches splice through the image, breaking the rich color surface of the photo, giving you these pinpricks of light that are meant to distract you. The viewer is meant to fully examine the image and play with how the light bounces between the image, the splicing and the magnification of the loupe.

Within ten minutes of these instant film photos being taken, they were peeled apart. The chemicals barely had enough time to finish developing the photos, so the chemicals had yet to completely cement the layers of the Polaroid together. As the layers are peeled apart, the image begins to crack and spiderweb. The crisp image stuck to the transparent image protector, but as it peeled, small bits of the chemical layers peeled off the backing. This reveals how soon the image was peeled. The more dips in the chemicals, the more time the image was given to develop.

These images become a passage of time. The series is each stage of the image as I interrupt the image as it begins to form. The permanence and process of instant film is stopped before the image can set. They are cropped into circles in order to magnify and disrupt the medium of instant film even more, disconnecting the image and process from the final piece.

As a lens- based artist, the primary focus in my current work is layers. There is always a type of deconstruction or dissection of an image or object in the work that I do. I need to see the layers of meaning and how each piece creates the whole object. I have always wanted to dive into the mechanics of how and why something works the way it does. I never understood how things worked because I could never get a straight answer on what something did, just that it was important. The use of cameras, scanners, and other lens based media helps me document and look closely at each layer that makes up the whole.. A prime example of this is my interest in film and instant photos. The layered and largely invisible process of how the images appear is fascinating. But why? Why did this one piece of an object make such a difference in how the image operates.

Each layer or piece of an object completely changes how we view it. I see things completely different if I remove or introduce something new in the image. The need to be able to see something from every possible perspective and context drives my process of taking things apart and rebuilding them differently. I am interested in seeing images, objects, and people as constructions that are all made up of different components.

If I am taking away the piece that makes it whole by obstructing the content of a photo, why was that part important? Or is it at all? The meaning of each piece is completely altered when I dissect each part of it. I can take each piece apart and put it together differently and the meaning will still be different, even if I have all of the same pieces. By removing certain aspects, or laying out all the dissected pieces, I can get to the root of what is really important in each piece. I engage with a shift in meaning of images and objects and a sort of iconoclasm. I execute a series of steps in studio experimentation and material interventions without a clear end result in order to reconstruct a new image.