In this series of photographs, videos and book, I create an unsettling and obscure love story between two parts of the same woman, in which she seduces, hunts and destroys herself. Using imagery from Charcot’s 19th-century photographs of hysterical women, 1970s horrotica, tropes from porn, dialog from the Bachelor and rituals of self-care, I perform the most ageless of horror roles—I become the shadowy Other, a creature of the night. I live out who I have always known I am: something in between that doesn’t quite fit. Horror invites queerness openly, disrupting order and resisting definition. The female vampire is sexual, passionate, terrifying and abject.
I construct each photograph using multiple exposure on 4x5 film, working alone in my studio, doing my best to approximate focus and framing and imaging myself. This process encourages mistakes and a slippage between what I intend and what I receive. I am interested in using this in-between space to explore the gray areas, to perform and blur the distinction between good and bad and to resist norms. I want to shed old, worn ideas about my gender, my aging, my body, myself. I hope that if I create some friction, freedom might come. I believe there are many possibilities for self, many variations. Repeated, shifted, never the same twice.