Francie Bishop Good
Statement
My digitally manipulated photographs emerged from 20 years as a painter. Carly, my niece has been the subject of my work for the past seven years. My series Carly, TV, began from snapshots taken of my family in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Carly was either frolicking in front of the television, or mesmerized by the imagery on the set.
Those images of Carly and the TV, with their multiple possibilities, combined with my interest in digital technology were the inspiration for the series. The initial juxtaposition of Carly’s innocence against the brashness of the TV created disparate dialogue that was a jumping ground for ideas. The television became a loaded object that acted as both a sculpture and a two-dimensional image. The television scenes also represented a specific time in the American culture. The screen became my canvas for political, social and artistic expression. Distorting the pictures on the TV gave me an opportunity to investigate my own fears and add that eerie edge to the innocent but somewhat sexually charged American scenes. Stealing master paintings and making them my own or the TV’s own, was something lusciously sinful, and played a significant part of that series. The spectrum of images on the screen is varied but all of the scenes share that “not quite right” feeling.
Perhaps our familial relationship has just the perfect distancing for this work. I have the fortunate opportunity to observe her mature and change, sometimes maturing slowly by staying in the little girl mode and sometimes drastically, taking on various roles that she has seen in her life or in the media.
Finally, Carly also reminds me of me. Perhaps she is my alter ego. She is very artistic and has a tendency to be in her own world. She has an intensity that manifests itself directly in the camera and right at me. This intensity and the essence of the gaze, is what I continue to focus on. I play on the gaze in the TV, or on the street, by the morphing of Carly’s face with another photograph, TV scene or painting.
In the series Carly, Wax Museum, I juxtaposed the creepy, hyper-real world of waxed figures with their blank stares against the intensity of Carly’s gaze. She personifies and performs a teenager’s obsession with media stars. Without effort Carly molded herself into the positions that the wax figures were in. It is as if the gates of the weird world of television have opened up and the actors have walked off and dipped themselves into wax and delivered themselves to Carly for her enjoyment!
Carly As Everywoman is my on going partly conceptual, partly photojournalistic series. I merge Carly’s face into a person in the photograph, wherever I might be, it could be at Louvre, or on the streets of New York City, or the Swap Shop in Ft. Lauderdale.