The Projection Portraits series began in 2019 as still photographs and evolved into video work in 2020-2021. Each portrait captures the process of trying to line up my own body with a projected slide photograph of my maternal grandmother.
The portraits are an act of mourning, an act of longing for closeness, to the past, to my grandmother, to memories that weren’t my own. From the beginning, I had a desire to match up my grandmother’s features and my own and I tried desperately to capture the fleeting moments where our faces aligned, eyes on eyes, mouth on mouth. It did not occur to me when I started that a perfect alignment was nearly impossible, that our faces have different proportions and features and would never perfectly match. At first, this mismatch was an aggravation—the inability to achieve a complete merge between my physical body and the image of hers made of light. But soon it was the inconsistencies that held my attention—the slight mismatch of eyebrows, her teeth visible over my closed lips. The result was an imperfect amalgamation of myself and her, a version of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s “allo-portraits,” allo from the Greek allos which means other.
My projection portraits are self-portraits that highlight the familial other within the self. Instead of using costumes, make-up, or props to merge self with other, I use projected images—bathing myself in light shown through a small photographic positive that creates in the present a moment from the past. I do not become my grandmother in these images; I cannot. We are both present (and absent)—separately, together. Me as a physical body and she as a ghost, in the most basic sense that a ghost is a trace of a person. In the resulting images, we both become past representations. The images and the process of creating them are a meeting, an insertion of myself into old memories in order to create new ones, an attempt to see myself in her and her in me. While I travel back, she travels forward and together we meet somewhere in the middle. They are an act of mourning that seeks to bring the dead into communion with the living, one that recognizes relationality and the permeable boundaries of self.
Jen 7-1961/Allie 10-2021
2021/2022
Video
Jen 7-1963/Allie 10-2021
2021/2022
Video
Jen 1961/Allie 2022
2022
Video
Jen 1979/Allie 2022
2022/2024
Video
Jen 1971/Allie 2022
2022/2024
Video