This series of photos was made over a long period of time (2005-2009) in Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco and Los Angeles, California; and Phoenix, Arizona. They represent moments borrowed from four women: Christine, her sister Gina and Christine's two daughters Sloane and Sasha. Christine's instability, Sasha's melancholy, Sloane's repeated transformations and Gina's gender ambiguity add up to a whole spectrum of ever-changing seductions. The balance between promises and threats is sometimes unstable, shifting more clearly to one or the other.
The way this project was carried out over an extended timeframe made it possible to follow these fitful changes. Since the photos simply suggest possible scenarios, the approach leaves a great deal of room for the viewer's autonomous construction of narrative fictions. We see the unfolding of a perhaps unconscious exchange of identities back and forth between Sloane and her mother, Gina and her sister Christine, Sasha and her mother. The women share a singular intimacy with the imminence of disaster, which they cannot foresee.
The exhibition compresses and shuffles the years so that the photos taken of these women one at a time now comprise a single story. The physical layout can also produce an equally unique piece.
