beck haberstroh

here is an informal collection of thoughts and images from Jan-Feb 2021, the fragments I would show you if we were to meet in person, the ideas I would ask you about over snacks, with the hum of Open Studios in the background

prompted by Katie Giritlian's Paper Cameras project with Mira Dayal and myself, began a deep dive into this image of me standing in an early nineteenth century cutout- thinking about the binary roles represented, what it is to be placed physically within a history, the one hand reaching forward and the other holding back, the glance to the other

^Cutouts and script from a quick performance lecture developed for Paper Cameras, Jan 2021 

Excerpt from left (cutout for a face) - "What empty constructions are lying around in school gymnasiums, promising potential and history to whatever child wanders by? I wonder how smooth the wearing is. I wonder how much they sweat when building the construct."

Excerpt from right (cutout for hands) - "The cutouts next to me were empty. How did they decide that I needed a history?"

^Continued documentation of performance lecture and final cutout/script 

Excerpt from right (cutout that is an aperture) - "I'm looking for the ghost. I wonder how heavy the mechanism is."

Continuing to think about sweat and construction of legibility, began working with using my own sweat as the basis for photographic emulsion. Above, 3 6" by 4" sweat prints on muslin from binding my chest and running, of calibration images from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. How do we process the alien and unknown in order to make it visible in an image? to make it consumable for circulation for mass audiences?

a drawing offered to Mira following a conversation about ghosts, considering different forms that ghosts may take 

thinking about connections between Do you want to talk about the thing?, a series of celebrity deepfake apologies videos from early 2020 and Tigers and Angels, a video and scrapbook refiguring childhood photos of my brother and I from fall 2020, I've started playing with deepfaking vernacular images and placing them back into scrapbooks.