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While on a trip into Gold Country I came across an antique shop that was selling old photo albums dating from the late 1800s and early 1900s. While there was no accompanying documentation whatsoever, the photographs alone had so much story in them that it was almost unnecessary. They were the inspiration for a series of monotypes that act as tributes to the story they seemed to tell.
Red House: Home depicts two women who made the journey West on their own. Their affection for one another is so exuberant in their expressions and linked postures, it seemed they did not want for anything. I had a vision of them in front of a small house that they had built for themselves, tilling frontier land, having escaped the tedium of their previous lives into a new kind of freedom and hardship without fear or ever looking back.
Yvette is a girl whose stance and gaze radiates a remarkable self-possession and power. On the back of the photograph was written “YVETTE” (all in caps) and the date 1911. I envisioned her standing outside amidst the sprawl of her parents’ estate, a magical realm that no one was permitted to enter unless she found them interesting enough. I knew she could drop just about anyone in a fight, but also that she never had to. Boys, girls, men and women pledged their hearts to her. She broke them all, but it didn’t matter; their memories of her were sweet.
Revenge of the Fan Dancer is a tribute to the girl who knew precisely how to squeeze all of the money out of her sailor admirers before crushing them with complete indifference. Her youth had been spent as a strikingly beautiful, elegant boy in a small town that had no place for such things. Savagely beaten by a man who had dared to kiss him, he left for the city as soon as he could. She lived as a woman, and turned fan-dancing on its head with an irresistible, androgynous act.
The Impossible Boat was inspired by a series of photos of a pair of older women, one worldly and chic (who I imagined as forever single and tenuously connected to high society, the other more naive and dowdy (who I imagined to be long-married to an absent husband). Despite their different lives, they were obviously very close friends. I decided it was the fantasy of each woman that one day they take a voyage together around the world, by boat. All their lives, each time they met, they would elaborate on the details: where they would go, what they would do, who they would meet. They never actually went, but it didn't lessen their pleasure in the planning.
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A series of narrative woodblock prints; the titles describe all.