Studio Stimulus: Summer Edition

Catalyst: Department of Inspiration
I'm working on a book mockup of Clay Feet, and it's exciting to see it adapt and expand. I'm discovering gaps in the story, so I'm still shooting new images. Casting models from a wider pool has been great. It was helpful to realize that the images about my personal experience make sense as self-portraits, but the more tightly art history related images should be other characters. 

I've started making my own Mnemosyne Atlas style image clusters. Alternately satisfying and frustrating, these image groupings are generating new ideas  and sub-categories while getting me closer to the encyclopedia-like book I’ve been craving. The breast-chain image on the left is a self-portrait I made last summer about a kind of monstrous femininity, one that does not care to nurture. On the right is an example of one the groupings. 

Sample page layout from my Clay Feet mockup

My Muse: Scholar and Werewolf
In order to focus on the Atlas images, I've avoided reading about Aby Warburg himself, but I recently read an article I’d been saving. Turns out, he was afraid that he was turning into a werewolf! Is it possible that the images in the Atlas may have been the result of a mania or a kind of talisman collecting? Warburg had a medallion of Fortuna, and he was obsessed with it. He even accused his wife of stealing it, but then admitted that he had probably hidden it. Did he see the creatures and monsters in his Atlas as his cohort, or as protectors, or as terrifying reminders of his own condition?

At the Salpêtrière
At the beginning of July, I went to the International Society for the History of Neuroscience conference celebrating the 200th anniversary of Jean-Martin Charcot’s birth, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris. It was like going to grad school inside a walled medical city, and I loved every minute.

I learned about early neuroscience-but I was also haunted by the spectacle of the semi-naked ‘hysterical’ woman, the specimen with the white nightgown forever slipping off. One image, showing the so-called Arc de Cercle, kept resurfacing. Even the notorious Brouillet painting of Charcot includes a drawing of a female body locked in Arc de Cercle, on the far wall. 

A highlight was an exhibit in the Chapel Saint-Louis church. The nave was taken over by an impressive exhibition about the women and men who were patients, by the artists Camille Courier and Francine Saillant.

Dept of collaboration
In Paris I met in person with the brilliant gallery co-directrice Emilie Houssa, from the Centre Claude Cahun, and the talented Parisian photographer Céline Clanet and shared my book mockup. I love Clanet's thought-provoking book Second Skin and it was incredible to hold it in my hand and turn the pages. 

In early summer I had an epic Zoom studio visit with Melanie Manos, multimedia badass, performance artist and professor whose work inserts women into public spaces, sometimes virtually, sometimes physically. Her tricky mosaic images fit her body into claustrophobic spaces-detail below. 

“Aand Stretch” detail, courtesy of Melanie Manos

News

• This week I will be participating in a panel discussion, Science Illustrated for the lecture series Simons Presents, at the Simons Foundation on Friday night, July 18th. It’s sold out, so wish me luck. 

• I wrote about Brazilian photographer Gui Christ’s project M’kumba for Lensculture, which schooled me on Afro-Brazilian religions. As a journalist, it was challenging to describe how Christ changed direction in his photography project based on advice given by an ancestral spirit. But as an artist, I was jealous of his experience. 

• At work, I’ve been creating fast in-house illustrations for a host of breaking news articles on funding cuts and firings in science. The stories are heart-breaking, but it feels good to be able to do at least this one thing.

• I was honored to review design and illustration portfolios for The One Club in Manhattan.

Miscellany
You can protect your artwork from being ingested by AI models by adding Glaze/Nightshade to your images. I haven’t applied it to my work yet but I want to. 
Inspo share: Public Domain Review archive: Search for anything and be amazed and delighted by the results.

Peace, from the Pantea hand, by Filippo Palizzi, courtesy of the Public Domain Archive. 

Thanks for reading! You can subscribe to Studio Stimulus from the Rebeccahornephotography.com About page. 

I hope this newsletter can reclaim space from social media, and allow for a deeper conversation. I'm still on IG @rebeccahorne600, mostly to keep up to date with other artists.

Fig Face

The protruding stem declares itself awkwardly and stubbornly, open for interpretation. It juts off the chin, lengthens, then abruptly ends in a clean break. It is a leaf-mask. It could be leather. Or machine-made in its perfection. But it isn’t. It is green. And soft. In pictures, this leaf covers genitals. This leaf is an accomplice to shame. The protruding stem announces itself. It is an extension of the body both delicate and rude. A symbolic phallus? A tiny trumpet?

The mask both hides and creates identity. The stem is an imagined phallus, a middle finger. What is the inversion of desire? Repulsion. It is a leaf, masking the age and the identity of the woman underneath, who confronts the viewer with a single eye. 

The woman is suffocating. Suffocating under the weight of images. There’s no light, no air underneath. An infinity of pages where the only women are the nude subjects in photographs by and for men. So women will see themselves as men see them. And so women admire men for their sensitivity and their brilliance in finding so many ways to look at women. 

For women to be reminded to stay on the other side of the door. Women must look at men looking at women and see ourselves as men do. Women must be two at all times: the perceived and the actual. Try to act natural. “Smile”, he says. 

It is hard to hold this pose. I picked the fig leaf, snapping the stem, wiping the milky white sap. The leaf makes a curved shape that embraces my face, its tiny hairs scratching my face. It is painful to keep my head tilted, and the leaf in place, but I’m compelled to.

In art, young women are symbols filled with meaning--innocence, grace, fortune. Old women are witches, or gorgons. Skip this version. Smash it. Write an entirely new story. Become feral. Rub sticks together. Become nature, wild and free.

Sarah Knobel's Clay Feet write-up published on Lenscratch

It’s such an honor to have Sarah Knobel write about my work—she is a talented artist that I admire as well as a writer and a professor and more. You can read the Lenscratch article here.

Ending 2024: New York Times assignment

Last week I got an assignment from the NYTimes—to illustrate an essay by Sloane Crosley on reader’s letters after the publication of her book about grief. It was an out of the blue ask—I didn’t know the assigning Art Director, Elana Schlenker. The deadline was tight and I had a redeye back from CA in the middle of it. But the AD was kind and clear, and we got it done on time.

In the past, art directors have reached out to me about assignments, and I’ve been cagey. This was because I felt that I’d have to create a collage or use illustrator or some other technique I’m only somewhat competent in to be able to address editorial concepts. But after the New York Times art director sent me examples of my work that she liked I realized she was hiring me to do what I am already doing. This might seem super obvious but it wasn’t to me. This is not my first assignment or editorial job—but it is the first one where I used the same skills and style I use in my artwork. I realize I can shoot conceptual photography on assignment—and it feels good.

Data pictures collection takes a turn

It’s been a mad, mad summer. At the start, I had a series of experiences that made see that the patriarchy is never really done with women. These experiences have been woven into the work as have the new feelings of independence that have given me license to experiment. It’ been a heady combination of anger, joy and discovery.

I’ve had to update my artist statement for this project—things have evolved: The Data collection invites contrast of dry data with the messy intimacy of food, fluids and emotion. Data is information, and the Collection tries and fails to quantify emotion, consumption, sex. 

Food, measured and allotted, translates into the space we take up in the world. Food is conduit for pleasure, connection, comfort, sustenance. Also control, and appetite. The alchemy of the ordinary. Paper stands in for abstraction, ideas, flatness, transcendence.

Lost and Found

This weekend I spent hours trying to realize the right technique that would reproduce little scribbles from notebook margins as larger objects in space. The doodles I collected were mostly made during therapy sessions so they had some psychological drama. But nothing conveyed the immediacy of the pen marks. I tried wire of various weights, paper, ink, etc. I really felt that I was going to solve the challenge but I did not. I decided to leave it for another time.
I moved on to editing of a group of images I’m calling Data Pictures and in the process, discovered that there were many beautiful images I had overlooked while I was in pursuit of a particular thing. Sometimes when I get single minded and focussed on one idea, I miss a host of others. I never finished shooting the group, and I saw that there was more to do. I’m excited about making the rest of the images for this collection.

Refining the Pours / Waterfalls

How abstracted can a subject be, before it is no longer recognizable? Can proximity to other images of the same subject reinforce recognition? This ongoing body of work started as a collection of pours and/or waterfall shapes in various states of change and abstraction. I want to create a rich rhythm of images that plays with iterations of a subject to understand how meaning can shift from image to image. I want to examine the similarities or differences, and what is measured between them.

The subject of water evolved from two sources--the first was a body of work on vessels I explored as objects of fluid potential, capable of filling up and emptying out. The second was an impulse to connect swimming with my artwork. After rediscovering swimming last spring, I wanted to explore muscle memory as echoed in visible shapes. 

With the pours / waterfalls collection I'm trying to find the right level of simplification in different and flexible ways while also making a large group that ties together. Cutting the bigger shapes allows my body to interpret/make decisions as well. To find the shapes I sketch them on paper and then cut them out. The cutting takes the pressure off the act of drawing which feels weighed down by history, and creates instead an object in physical space.

Fall in Los Angeles, Paris and Washington DC

The photo above is a collection of images in my sketchbook. I’ve been working on this collection of grey on grey shapes that are based on waterfalls and pours without vessels. I’m challenging myself not to keep the cut shapes, but instead, to throw them away after shooting. The idea is that I draw/cut better when I work fast, and I think I will get better at it with more practice. I hope this will also help me hone the forms. With this series I’m struggling between the desire to have things be loose and messy, and the desire to let them be monumental.

Monumental pour/fall

Maybe I can do both messy, notational and monumental. I think I just need to keep shooting and then go back and see what shakes out. Some of these shapes have art-historical echoes: cubist guitars, landscape forms, etc. But I am actively avoiding those references. People get excited by these associations, but I don’t. I’m always after something else.

However, I recently interviewed Abelardo Morell about his new show at Edwynn Houk and wrote about it for Lensculture, so I have been thinking about this method of dialoging with well known art. I respect his and other artists direct engagement with art history. I just don’t want to do it myself, or at least not in a planned or deliberate way.

Outside of the studio, it has been a season of travel. After traveling to Los Angeles for the Adobe conference in October, I went to Paris Photo for the first time in November. Lucky for me, my press pass got me free access everywhere. I spent nearly 2 full days at the fair until my eyes were bursting, then spent more time looking at art elsewhere: Carolyn Drake’s exhibit at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as the Pompidou and the Picasso museum, currently thrillingly taken over by Sophie Calle. Evenings were full of delicious meals and conversation, and days were full of art and connecting with other artists.

With Ira Lombardia in front of her work, mounted on lazy susans at the Alarcon Criado booth

My phone’s battery was weak so I got around using a paper map and the metro. The streets kept me guessing, but the metro never let me down. It was rainy and cold, so it was a relief to arrive in Washington DC for the Society for Neuroscience conference, where it was sunny and the trees still had color. Highlights of the neuroscience conference included lectures on the mechanisms of the inner ear and the brain, the evolution of sleep in reptiles, and the launch party for the new Simons Foundation neuroscience publication, The Transmitter. Nonetheless, it was a relief to get home.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately—some about science and some about art. My review of Drake’s extraordinary book Men Untitled and my commissioned essay and photos for Berm magazine were published in November, and I have articles published at The Transmitter, including this favorite interview with two sailor-neuroscientists.

Summer of beginnings / endings

After leaving my son Oliver at college on Friday, I found myself traversing a bare and lonely mental space. I could hear the wind whistling in my ears. 

This person I had built my life around for seventeen years was leaving. He gave my life momentum, meaning and structure. Driving away, time stretched both forward and backwards—to the hospital where he was born, breastfeeding, catching him when he fell down the stairs. Now where was he? He was away. And moving ever further. 

In the days leading up to his departure, both of us were in shock. We shopped joylessly for his dorm room. We ate a rare meal at McDonald’s in the mall. We took the subway. I felt that I should be performing a tradition or ritual to mark the occasion but didn't have it in me.

Friends remind me that this separation repeats in mini cycles—they come home, and then leave again. I’m glad not to be the only person going through this, but I know that my bond with Oliver as a single parent and only child has an intense primacy. 

Then there is the question of the unfinished art project—The Alchemist. Oliver and I have been working on it for three years. We started it during the pandemic. Initially, the plan was that we would enact key moments from the book, as a series of photographs, with Oliver as the protagonist. In October 2020, I wrote:

Just finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho—a book that has been on my shelves, unread, until Oliver picked it up recently and read it. It is an allegory about a boy shepherd finding his treasure. The boy’s character is very pure and light and it suffuses the book, which is simply written, but rich in meaning. At the end of the story the actual treasure is found, but the boy’s life is so full and he has learned so much by the time he finds it, the treasure seems extraneous. The real treasures are his encounters with the Soul of the World, enabled by various teachers, his own good nature, and following his own destiny.

The book forced me to think more deeply about ideas like destiny. Much is written about how fortune favors those who follow it. Only not all of us have a king in disguise appear to us and reveal it. This line, “The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it is all written there,” stood out to me as beautiful. Could this be true?

His journey starts with a repeated dream, which he goes to a fortune teller about. Other themes are omens, and listening to your heart. The boy has some long conversations with his heart. 

He eventually learns to speak the Language of the World. In a dramatic scene, he talks to the wind and the sun and finally, he uses love and prayer to reach the hand that wrote all, in order to turn himself to wind. This is also where he understands for the first time that he is a part of the Soul of God. There is a line in the book where a wise person notes: A blessing ignored becomes a curse.

In our last days together, I was not able to shoot the Alchemist images I had sketched out. There was no way I could begin to approach making art. I will have to return to it next time I see him. I’m not sure this series will ever be fully complete, but I know I can bring it closer, and I think it may become a book.

Endings are not just new beginnings in disguise. They must be mourned and acknowledged. I must be like the boy on his journey—learn to be the wind, or to become one with it. Then the sound in my ears will be the sound of movement, passing through pain, becoming the world, not standing outside of it.

Hudson Valley Writers Residency

I’m writing from an antique fold-out writing desk on the parlor floor of an old rambling house in the historical district of Coxsackie. This house on Ely street is the Hudson Valley Writers Residency, just steps from the Hudson river. Today is my second full day here.

I’m here working on a new artist newsletter plan, as well as applications and of course taking some photos. I’ve been digging in on the writing. I made some progress this morning, writing away through tears. I want to start a newsletter that is personal but that also touches on broader themes. I’m not sure how to do this, but that’s why I’m here. Figuring it out.

Of all the newsletters I read, there are only two newsletters that I really love and that I can look to for inspiration. The first is illustrator/artist Carson Ellis’s Slowpoke. She writes endearingly on life, love, parenting, and art in the process. Second is Journalist/podcaster Rose Eveleth’s Bucket of Eels. An eccentric, original, intellectual treat.

Art therapy in the studio

Today’s studio time felt like therapy—it was a lot of emotional work. A lot of my work is highly sublimated—sometimes the intellectual part of me is in the forefront. But lately I’ve been wanting to welcome in some more physical immediacy to the work. The past month or so I’ve been grieving but also celebrating—in somewhat of a chaotic emotional space. 

I’ve been shooting a lot with some low angle light that creates inky shadows. I may not get a lot of studio time during the week but I do make up for it over the weekend by working my butt off. I try to stay current with my ideas during the week by checking in with my sketchbook, where I store my ideas and sketches. 

Today I broke up the studio time with a swim and a long walk. Sunday in Brooklyn was gorgeous, a reminder that not every summer day will be life-threateningly hot. Not yet. 

On Saturday I swam a section of an unsanctioned race/swim called the “Megaloop.” The penultimate distance was 6 miles. I swam 2 miles in very choppy water down to Manhattan beach with another CIBBOWS swimmer who was about my pace. It took a while and was hard because of the conditions, but I felt strong, and we finished our 2 miles happy and thirsty for fresh water.

Portrait or myth-making

The Alchemist series began as a kind of comic book but transformed over 3 years into a story about my son, Oliver. I think one of the most interesting tensions in the series is between allegory and myth and portraiture.

Some images are more one or the other. This one feels more allegorical—he is making eye contact, but the setting is deliberate and perhaps overpowering. This image may be about finding identity and grappling with beauty.

Today, I felt elation as I was shooting Oliver through the kitchen door. There he was! There he is. He is my most important project. We did it. He is almost launched. 

I try to keep my single motherhood out of the narrative of my art making, but for this project I can’t separate it. It is true there is a seven year gap in my artist CV. But look who came out of that. 

Oliver / Alchemist spring 2023

I’ve been shooting as much as possible with Oliver, who leaves in August for college. He’s been in art photos for me since around 3rd grade. By now, he knows a lot about my work, and as a model he can be very patient and intuitive. We both read Paul Coelho’s book The Alchemist during the pandemic, and I started a project photographing him as the protagonist. 

At first I was focussed on finding ways to interpret vignettes and moments from the book. Over time I’ve moved on to themes that include transformation, exploration, and transition. Some of the photos that I like the best are some of the in-between moments, when he is not acting the part or doing something I’m asking him to do, but maybe he is just petting the cat. In that way, portraits of him as a person are also part of it. I also realize some of the photos are about our relationship, too, and our journey as a small family of mother and son. 

Data pictures

I’m working on a new series of images that are related to the idea of data.

After an inspiring conversation a few months ago with postdoc fellow @centerforcomputationalquantumphysics @ol.gringas and others from @thekitchen_nyc I started thinking about systems of knowledge. For example, how many different approaches or systems or metaphors do we have for understanding new information, and could I collect them? These images are not exactly answering this question, but they are scratching the itch.

Lensculture Critics Choice 2022 winner

My Vessel collection series was a winner in the lensculture Critics Choice awards 2022: “The images in Rebecca Horne’s series “Vessel Collection” are brilliant illusions that play with the ideas of volume, depth and containment, while challenging the two-dimensional flatness of a photograph. They look deceptively simple, and the execution of their ideas seems flawless. Each image in the series presents a different take, providing a pleasing rhythm and adding to the sense of wonder.” Jim Casper of lensculture

Valence Inventory poster ready to ship

Introducing Valence Inventory, a playful photographic take on atomic preferences — the joining patterns of elements in the periodic table. Valence can be deduced from the relative position of each element in the table. Valence Inventory is available as a 23x35”poster, digitally printed on 50 lb. Durotone. The poster design is by Francesca Richer, printed by Puritan Press. You can order it here: https://www.rebeccahornephotography.com/shop

Valence Inventory is a grid of 25 images closely related to each other in color, shape and form.

Why Valence? Because observation leads to more linked paths, planes and values. Why Inventory? Because Minecraft players get an object inventory on a grid. Because I love collections of images. Because I have a storehouse of shapes and images.

Why make a poster? It seemed like it would be a lighthearted way to share what I’ve been working on.

The Alchemist

Oliver is growing before my eyes, and I am rushing to shoot this project with him before he sheds all vestiges of childhood. It has been a pleasure to shoot this with him—he is a really good model. He is willing to humor me and to inhabit the scenes and vignettes with grace.

We also laugh a lot because some of it is so silly. The idea for this series came from The Alchemist, an allegorical book by Paulo Coelho about the journey of a shepherd boy. Oliver recommended it to me and then I read it too—we both really liked it. Initially the plan was a series of four images charting the boy’s journey and epiphanies, but it has become bigger than that. My guess is that this series may never be Great, but it will likely be interesting. It is a collaboration, and one of the more challenging things I’ve attempted as an artist, so I will keep at it.

Air basket process

I recently declared that I was done with vessels—I was moving on! Mainly, I don’t want to repeat myself, and I’m interested in a lot of other directions.

But none of that matters, because, as it turns out, I just have to keep doing what I am interested in. Otherwise, what is the point? So somehow, here I am again—shooting more vessels. As the gallerist Brian Clamp recently reminded me, there is nothing wrong with having a theme.

I just hope that I am truly getting better and going deeper, not just making the same image over and over again, in ever more refined terms. To me, this image has a hint of a clumsy archeology display and/or explanatory literature, where so much is conjecture.

I feel pleased with this picture, but it didn’t come together instantly. It was the result of weeks of experimenting with a ‘basket’ form. I saw this very cool basket at the textile show at MOMA a while back, it was a very loose weave so that the form seemed to be to be a special kind of air basket. A vessel with indistinct boundaries, maybe. The artist is Ed Rossbach, but I am only interested in his basket, below, not his other work. It was also the only object in the show that could have been an artifact in basic archeological sense.

by Ed Rossbach

Some of the experimentation involved drawing the basket several times, then shooting the drawing in various ways and more. You can see some of it here in the sketchbook page, below, along with an early version of the orbit paths image I have been working on.

Video tour of my show at Galerie Confluence

Galerie Confluence sent a short video tour of my exhibit. It is exciting to see the different print sizes together—the giant mural of the lunar calendar, the two floors, and most importantly, viewers! Actual people looking at my pictures. Intently. For a long time.

I am sure artists with more exhibition experience are nonchalant about this, but I can’t help being pleased and kind of amazed.

It is amazing to think how this polished looking show started with me puzzling over the gallery floor plan and test strips all over the living room floor. I am so grateful that I had all this work for the show and the book to keep me busy during the worst parts of the pandemic. It has kept me sane.

I mailed the second half of the books today, and nearly all of the small prints. Still to send: a few of the larger prints, and some books and smaller prints to the people who haven’t sent me their addresses. It seemed I would never get to the end of this mailing task, but it is happening! Hooray for the post office. I only had to wait 40 minutes instead of the usual hour to get to a clerk. Partial view of the usual line below. This is before you even get into the lobby!