Caryl Burtner | Sonya Clark | Talia Greene | Ruth Marten | Althea Murphy-Price | Loren Schwerd
I am fascinated by our struggle to impose order on our bodies and an unruly world. Whether depicting squashed bugs under tape, Victorian facial hairstyles, or a filigree of dead flowers and hair, my work is united around an exploration of that tension between nature and our desire for control. I find a window into that tension through the exploration of related dichotomies, in the merging of sensuality and sterility, entropy and design, containment and vulnerability, or control and subjection.
In this series of prints entitled, Coiffed: A Typology of Entropic Variations, altered cabinet cards reference the urge to control nature, and its futility, with a playful exaggeration of the quotidian frustration of taming our hair. In each portrait, the hair takes on a life of its own in the form of a swarm of flies. It grows; runs wild; starts to conform; then runs wild once more. With each new hairstyle, the sitter takes on a new identity. Even as we try to impose our will on nature, nature imposes its anarchy on us.
