I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
I am an early career artist whose practice explores my fascination with fictional horror through primarily digital methods of making. Within the broader realm of horror, I have a particular interest in monsters, voyeurism, and depictions of female brutality, sadism, and masochism. Using my own image and body exclusively, my work presents versions of womanhood that transgress the bounds of what we are taught is acceptable, uncanny spectres of female experience that society is keen to repress. Here, monstrosity is configured as a source of damnation and agency, reflecting womanhood as complex and contradictory.
My own experience as a mother has been one of profound contradiction, of exhilarating highs and profound lows, of love and fury, comfort and trauma. I struggle to reconcile the fact that the greatest time in my life is also the one when it was the darkest, and that my body birthed a miracle but feels like a ruin. I am not as I was, but not quite sure what I am now; I’ve yet to turn into anything resembling the gargantuan mother archetype we’re fed, and too much of the old Jess remains for me to consider myself someone new. I have been transformed, reborn, reconfigured using the old parts. Some days those new parts feel like they were made of steel, making me infinitely stronger than I was, and other days that steel bites into my flesh, broken limbs fused back together suddenly failing to bear my weight.
Motherhood is a monstrous condition; it is incredible and disturbing, beautiful and completely fucked up. Like monstrosity, it is transformative, and for the woman-monster, this transformation is a source of both agency and damnation, strength and weakness. My work since my son is in part an attempt to reconcile the contradiction inherent in my own experience of motherhood, and to bridge the divide between what I am and what we are told a mother should be.
Experiencing pregnancy for the second time has greatly influenced my work, causing me to reflect much more closely on the process of bearing a child. There is the strange bodily awareness and attempts to reconcile this cavernous space that exists within me, and evocations of my own paranoias as I imagine this space as a place of both hope and doom. I like to think there is also some absurdity when one looks at a ridiculous, bulbous woman, or my lady-giants, but there is also the tenderness of the nets that keep the babies close to her body, or the way a stomach is opened up to sate the curiosity of the smaller figures who peer inside. There is the sorrow of the figure on the bridge as she surveys the fallen before her (a mediation on periods in history where the practice of fallen-mothers ending their lives and the lives of their offspring was not only a grim expectation, but an act of redemption), and my attempt to see a ruin as a place of beauty and life.
Guests are invited to celebrate the opening of the exhibition An Intimate Portrait of Motherhood with a reception on Tuesday, March 1 at 4:00 PM. Both the reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public.
This exhibition forces the viewer to confront the sensual, intimate nature of breastfeeding and the physical mother-child relationship. Through photography and video, these two artists use the lens to examine and cope with the physical, emotional and mental complexities of the mother’s body. Katie Doyle’s work gives the audience a vantage point so close they feel as if they’re seeing from inside her, while her son suckles and consumes milk or entangles his soft limbs in hers. Ogier-Bloomer’s photographs utilize a frank, unapologetic voice shared between image-maker and subject: whether she appears in the image with her daughter, her mother, or from behind the camera. Both artists examine this unique maternal communication based in touch—a language without words, rooted in biology and the senses.
Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Anna Ogier-Bloomer holds an MFA in Photography & Related Media from Parsons School of Design, where she was awarded the Photography Department Prize in 2011. Shereceived her BFA from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was the recipient of the Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography and a Dean's Travel Grant. Ogier-Bloomer has exhibited at galleries and museums nationally, including the Bridge Art Fair in Miami/Basel, The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts. She has received grants from Chashama in New York, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and CSArts Cincinnati. Anna has been an adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University of New York. She currently lives in New York City and travels often for her work.
- See more at: http://www.wellesley.edu/event/node/81611#sthash.V6lNZjEu.dpufAgainst Myself, Together I Stand:
I am an Artist, a Teacher and a Single Mother, all titles that I am proud to call myself. With all of these titles I bear the solo responsibility of telling our story (my daughter's and mine). I am her memory, guide and compass. Life moves quickly and the images that we make together are the times that we get to play and escape into our own world; my love for my daughter is infinite, and is chronicled by the images that we make together.
Truthfully I have really struggled over the years. I have done most everything in my life without money and shear determination. Whether it was driving across the country by myself for work, going to graduate school for photography or simply going it alone as a single parent. It is with a great sense of grit and hope that I have tried to approach most things with in my life.
I feel that at this moment that I am on the precipice of finding the work that I have been seeking to make my since I started. There is a calmness and playfulness that drives me now, a curiosity to keep exploring new things photographically.
The idea of working in separate panels stemmed from the struggle of having a wiggly small child and I wanting to find a way to get both of us in the photograph together. I wanted to make the photographs myself and did not want to, or could not afford to hire a photographer to do it for me. So I had to think about what I wanted in the photograph with us, and what the background was going to be like. The next question would be, “what will connect us and unite us visually”, then I would begin to construct my image in my head.
The introduction of multiple-selves into my current work began to materialize as I felt the burden of having to be multiple selves for my daughter. I have to be her protector, nurturer, fixer of broken toys and more. There are no breaks for the solo parent. I find myself simultaneously being several people at once on a daily basis. My daughter and I have created a small bubble that is the two of us alone.
The actual space of my photos is constructed, often due to the constraints of photographing in small spaces around my house or in quick shots taken with my daughter in our real daily life. The extension of panels, repeated visual space and simply flipped mirror images, helps to elongate the space around us, putting us further into the setting of my memory.
I am a single Mother, artist and teacher and all these things combined leave little time for the reflection on the immediate “now”, photography gives opportunity to my daughter and myself. Our journeys are full of life, taste, and laughter, indulging in the imagination of the very young and easily embellished imaginations. Life is awkward, and truth is painful, memories are not the truth and history will be a combination of all these factors anyway.
As a Mother/Photographer/Biographer I do not take the recording of our shared history or events lightly. However as a photographer I try to focus my view of life in such a way as to be able to see staged tableaus in every place that I encounter. I can see in my minds eye the moment before and after the event that I am capturing with my camera. There is a prevalent feeling for me in which I want to save moments, small moments that happen briefly and then vanish and are gone. I record moments in time so that I can go back and look at them again and again. I am captivated with light and the small moments in time that occur within every day.
Once the final images are twisted, turned, color corrected and turned again, even slight adjustments pop into place and then the meaning is there, it is saved, it is more truthful than the truth. I am creating the memory of my daughter’s childhood, the bubble in which we are in, our internal memory, whether it be flawed, imperfect or not quite real.