PORTALS
Simulacra asks what happens to reality as it passes through successive layers of reproduction. Portals asks what if those layers become doorways.
The series works with surfaces that separate two worlds and the things that cross between them — mirrors that show a sky you can't see from where you're standing; a letterbox through which eyes peer while a hand presses a Polaroid of a mouth against the door, assembling a face across a threshold; sunglasses containing worlds entirely different from the face that wears them. The props are the same: the photograph, the mannequin part, the gloved hand, the doll. But here they're not just copies. They're gateways.
Every image holds two spaces — even two times — simultaneously. This side and that side. The real (or copy of the real), and its reflection. The photograph one views, taken in the past, of another photograph that becomes a gateway to another past.
I'm interested in the gap between them, fascinated by the threshold and what happens when our minds cross it — the charged moment when a surface stops being a barrier and becomes a door, and the question of what you might find on the other side if you look carefully enough. Joseph Campbell wrote about “crossing the threshold” — the point in a mythic hero’s journey where the hero first crosses from the ordinary world into the special world, and then discovers that one of the monsters they discover on the other side is the shadow they’ve brought with them.
