EVE FOWLER

This year, aside from my collaborative projects, I have been making black photographs. The photographs are printed black from 4-by-5 negatives. Although no image can be seen in the print, the content is described in the titles: Woman Waiting (referencing a Faith Wilding piece), Two Friends at Home (referencing a Diane Arbus photograph of lesbians), Woman Leaping, Woman Seated, Naked, and so on. After struggling with representation of people and the problems that it poses for a long time, I decided to continue to make the photographs but to allow the viewer to imagine the content described. Images will only appear in my work now when I am making a collaborative piece, or if the subject is not a person. The first black photograph, Woman Leaping, is of Anna Sew Hoy, who was also the first person I photographed in 2004 for the series of photographs of women I made that year. I have recently collaborated with Anna Sew Hoy and Math Bass, both of whom I have photographed in the past few years. Bass suggested we collaborate in 2007 because she found the role as subject to be a little too passive and thought we should collaborate.

Our collaboration is a document of a sexual performance. These photographs describe an imagined space for queer desire to be directed and complicated by bodies, unable to be read. The hole has been created in context to a policed history of queer sexuality, and in this series the illicit and anonymous environment is being transposed upon queer bodies.

In 2007 Anna Sew Hoy also suggested working collaboratively. We made a series of double exposures which we are still working on, and we made Fist, which is a photograph of Anna’s fist pushing through clay, one of the materials she uses to make her work, creating a power symbol, and a queer sexual innuendo.

In 2008 Lucas Michael (another Los Angeles artist and friend) and I opened Artist Curated Projects in my Los Angeles apartment. It’s a space for our friends who are artists to curate projects. Jeff Ono, Alex Segade, and Pearl Hsuing curated the first three shows. Veronica and Kiki Johnson; Anna Sew Hoy, Erika Vogt, Ellie Murphey, and Rico Gatson; Shannon Ebner and Lecia Dole Recio are curating shows in 2009. Michael and I are curating an ACP project in New York at the art production funds space in SoHo. I consider the inclusion and curation of my artist friends to be an important part of my practice.