September 2011

In the last decade, I have focused my work on the female experience and redefining the stories and stereotypes that are presented to women as children. In my experience, childhood parables often related women to nature, flowers, the seasons - our bodies are tied to the natural world. Even in fairy tales, women find themselves entrenched in woodland settings, fighting to preserve their chastity in the face of big bad wolves, beasts, or clever witches. These are the stories that made an impression on my psyche, and today I continue to explore the connection between women and the natural world. I question the validity of these stories; I incorporate the landscape through double exposures, and sometimes I make fun of the stories and lessons that were supposed to make me a proper woman.

I often use double exposure photography, shooting with a plastic Holga "toy" camera and 120 film, and a Polaroid Land Camera 103 with instant color film. Double exposures are made by taking two photos on the same piece of film in order to create an image that has a deeper meaning than either photo could produce singularly.

I see double exposure photos as visual poems in which scenarios are woven with multiple ideas to create new realities. These constructed realities reveal the psychology of a photograph, the emotions of people in the frame, and the relationship of a landscape to the human condition and the construction of society. While people often think of photographs as "proof" of an event, double exposures question everything about our world and relationships. A double exposure reads more like a dream, in which our subconscious is revealed. Sometimes it is beautiful, glowing with light and color, and other times it has a looming presence, threatening some dark event just outside of the photo. I use the energy of lines purposely in my photos to create scenes that are synchronous between form and intellectual intent. For example, a landscape of gnarly trees or a forest of rotting fallen foliage suggests a tumultuous and troubled psychological state, while smooth rolling hills and sweeping vistas create a more romantic feeling.

Most of my photos are taken while walking around town. In composing a double exposure I might find one photo on a street corner, and then look for a scene that I think is complimentary in tonal range and line quality for the second part of the image. Other times I have simple "photo shoots" with the women in my life. In these photo shoots we play with stories, simple props, and natural elements. This relaxed approach allows for us to let our subconscious relax and come out in the way we create photographic realities.

Stephanie Marie Hatch July 15, 2011

My work is about stories, stereotypes, nature, and the materials that I choose to use. Every day I am reminded of stories I heard growing up, stories about what is right versus wrong, stories about what a "lady" does, stories about love, sex, morality, and the idealistic beauty of nature.

I grew up in the woods, so nature has always been part of my work, and I got my first camera by winning a coloring contest when I was still younger than 10 years old, so those two elements have always been joined together for me: nature and photography. And in the same way that these two parts of my life create more meaning when put together, I find deeper meaning in my photography by exploring double exposures. I see double exposures as visual poems that have the ability to remind the viewers of past personal occurrences, allowing the viewer to delve deeper into the psychology of the photo than a straightforward documentary photograph might.

However, I do not find satisfaction in one medium alone. Most of my work is mixed media, as different intellectual quandaries need to be dealt with in different ways. Exploration of materials creates more avenues in which to explore the issues that interest me.

In the last six years I've been working to create art that deals with the stories I remember from childhood. I think about all the different ways that my identity has been formed, and I make fun of the ridiculous pieces, like magazine ad depictions of women. I am interested in dispelling the unnatural images we have chosen to represent ourselves. By appropriating these images and criticizing them, either with sarcasm or mimicry, I am taking the original power from them and turning it into a new reality that denies their validity. Embroidery is one method that I use to reference the traditional pastimes of women, but I use it in a way that is contrary to the traditional pretty patterns we are used to, so as to point out the ridiculous nature of whatever story I'm dealing with in a piece.

In my new paintings I am appropriating nature, literally taking leaves and vines and using them as stencils with spray paint. These spray painted stencils form the base of "Bouquet" pieces, in which patterns arise that mimic nature, but do not and cannot replace nature. I create an image with them that represents nature in shape, but my use of spray paint, markers and colored pencils contradict the inherent qualities of nature, that being the natural world. My tools, my media, are unnatural, having been created in factories. While a bouquet is a symbol for sentimentality, romance, or reverence, my bouquets mark a more obsessive and destructive pattern.

My images are not realistic to nature because it would be hypocritical to try to duplicate nature with unnatural materials. Instead, I am pushing my materials to an unrealistic realm of representation to highlight the absurd use of my synthetic materials.

I live in a society of plastic and silicone. Electronics and technology rule this world. Without factories I would not have these tools with which I work. Factories fill the spaces where real nature used to be. My use of such materials is a direct contribution to the perpetuation of such industry. The industry that profits off temporary materials, and the consumption of nature.

            I received my BA in Art from Southern Oregon University in 2006.  Through the course of my education, my work came to focus on the female experience.  For over three years now I have been examining the relevance or fallacy of stereotypes and social expectations that are directed upon women.  I recognize female habits as rituals (e.g. shaving my legs is a subconscious connection to my sexuality) and I see life milestones as rites of passage (e.g. receiving my grandmother’s wedding rings after her funeral told me I was expected next in line to get married). 

            Three years ago I started incorporating mixed media into my work, using photography, painting, drawing, collage, and old fabric.  I use embroidery both as a method of drawing and painting.  My use of thread references traditional female pastimes, an activity of creation and domesticity, delicacy and femininity.  My embroidery represents a woman’s voice, revealing basic truths about my sex, the basic form of our emotions, thoughts, power struggles, and relationships to the stories that are told about us. 

            My work references fairytales, The Bible, and mythology.  Forms of mermaids, women-animals, Adam and Eve, Venus, and Icarus have already found their way into my work.  I even use photos of my family, Xeroxed out of my photo album.  I’m also influenced by feminist texts like The Feminine Mystique which highlights “domestic aspects of feminine existence… [as] a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.” (Friedan, 1963, 38)  This text reminded me of the domestic lives my grandmother and aunts led, translating into a photographic narrative in which my subject becomes so absorbed in her laundry that she fades away into the clothes hanging on the clothesline.  A photo of an ex-boyfriend, face sewn over with black thread, becomes the centerpiece of a drawing about regret and poor decision making – while this is a personal reflection from my life, it is a sentiment that most women and men can relate to when a bad relationship is over.

            My Xerox transfer and embroidery drawings are not concerned with filling the blank space of the page.  They are direct, and to the point, understanding the strength of color and the purpose of line.  I used to be obsessed with elaborate pattern, but have been working to communicate more precisely, and these drawings are my method of telling the world what I have learned from the women in my life, and the honesty in story telling for which I long.

            The female experience is the primary focus of my photography.  I work with multiple photo narratives to contradict stereotypes, myths, and traditional expectations of women.

            Themes of love, sexuality, femininity, maternal instinct, and domestic obligation recur throughout my work.  I often use self-portraiture as a method of expressing the emotional struggles I encounter in day to day life.  Only printing in black and white, I adore the rich tonal ranges reminiscent of a long-seated nostalgia associated with the myths and stereotypes my work challenges.

            I also photograph with a plastic Holga for soft-focus double exposures that evoke a dreamlike understanding of women and memories.  There is an alluring juxtaposition between the mechanical methodology of photography and the resulting softness and delicacy of my double exposures.  Double exposures suggest memories created by the seemingly random nerve firings in our brains, resulting in overlapping images of two ideas that bring greater meaning to one another than they could produce singularly. 

            My photography aims to challenge old fictions and replace them with new truths.  I believe the accessibility of photography to viewers encourages new thought more successfully than other media.  The availability of camera phones and digital cameras enables viewers to participate in the photographic dialogue rather than feel threatened by my images.  I offer the viewer a humanistic understanding of my gender through beautifully erasing outgrown expectations.

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            In my photography, I enjoy experimenting with different cameras and print formats.  Mixing images and creating double exposures allows for new ways of thinking about memories, places, and experiences.  Our minds begin to weave a web around the two represented images and come away with something more than one of the images could have given us singularly.

            Film is still my mode of creation.  I enjoy the tangible quality of manipulating a photo in the darkroom.  The wonder of seeing an image appear out of the paper never ceases to amaze me, and is something I cannot get from digital photography.

Retinal  

            Retinal is a series of photographs created by using a Polaroid instant camera that I bought at Goodwill for only three dollars. The flash goes off on every shot unless I cover it with my hand, the focus is fixed.  I often use film from EBay, which can deliver defective or expired film that results in strange light apparitions and patterns.  Many artists call this element of chance “happy accidents,” and indeed, some of my favorite photos reveal a collaboration between me, the photographer, and the camera’s film, which seems to be an entity working of its own accord.

            Experimentation is always important in one’s work, and finding beauty in the mundane is one of the many jobs of a photographer.  When starting Retinal, I wanted to get away from the square format of photographs.  The angular corners of a square often let in extra information.  A person’s field of vision is elliptical, and when composing a photograph, it’s usually an element that strikes me.  In order to focus on that initial element of interest, I created a circular filter for my Polaroid camera using blue painter’s tape and a hand-held hole-punch. 

            The elliptical format references the human retina.  The things that strike your fancy through any day may be very plain: an unlabeled sign, a lost apple, the contrast of two colors.  Seeing these sights is not about holding up a square viewfinder to “frame the shot”; it is about seeing an element that strikes your mind and makes you think, recall, wonder, compare, and desire to capture that element for future reference.  Even people who are incapable of seeing “outside the box” are said to suffer of a condition that suggests an elliptical plane of sight: tunnel vision. 

            I consider myself blessed with sight – my appreciation of vision has always been one of the driving forces behind my desire to create art.  The act of seeing, even the ordinary, offers us the chance to revel in the beauty we find in small places and spaces, yielding an exhilaration that keeps us all believing in the magic and gratification of trying to save the world in a photo.

            I’ve been working with mixed media and feminist issues since the beginning of 2006.  About 6 months into this new focus of my work, I read The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan (©1963). This book greatly influenced my work in the following months, and continues to spur mental reflection about the feminine mystique’s presence in my past, clinging to the women that I grew up around, unconsciously sliding from the tongues of relatives, friends’ parents, children’s books, or other young girls.  There were many minds in my small home town that had not escaped the idea of the feminine mystique that “makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence…into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.” (Friedan, 38)

            Incorporated with painting and photography, I use embroidery, sewing, and fabrics deliberately, as a means of referencing my implied domestic purpose.  I want to use these techniques in a way that contradicts the traditional “pretty in pink” pastimes of women.  I also use symbols and patterns to suggest particular stories, games, and moral obligations (religion?).  Stories are a very important aspect of my work, and my work questions, challenges, and rejects stories of marriage, love at first sight, knights in shining armor, physical beauty, sex as a means of purpose, motherhood, religious righteousness, and patriotism.  I consider these stories catalysts for societal rights and rituals that distinctly influence our perception of identity. 

            Viewers of my work should recall stories from their lives that raised questions about their purpose and expectations about themselves and others.  I want people to think about the way we view one another – the way gender affects our identity.  Hopefully, my work will spur people to recognize if they have believed stories, not truths, and inspire change in the way they think about themselves or the other gender. I want people to become empowered, more confident, less apologetic, more honest, and brave.  I don’t want people to be jerks.  I don’t want to be a jerk.

            But we can’t have everything now, can we? 

            Can we?