The Stick (2016-ongoing)

My father scrawled the words “the stick” beneath the last drawing he made on his deathbed. In the picture, he’s laid out under a cross-shaped morphine drip while a nurse gives him a blowjob. In this series of photographs, I borrowed his title and used sexually explicit imagery to examine power dynamics that have influenced my life. These are the first photographs I made after renouncing my participation in the tradition of American road trip photography. The photographs link three interior spaces: my apartment in New York City, my hometown of Ful- ton, New York, and my mother’s home in rural Virginia. They invaginate fragments of life (my cat, my lovers, a bloodied tampon) and allude to feminist works by Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Betty Tompkins, Han- nah Wilke, and Every Ocean Hughes. Jessica Benjamin writes in Bonds of Love, “the mother’s vagina is too large... her primal swamp of narcissistic bliss threatens to reabsorb us...” Rather than valuing models of nurture of care, we are too often inclined to opt for an oedipal mode of individuation through domination. This work reflects my attempt to traverse the psychically charged terrain of intimacy, seeking to exchange our domineering instinct for moments of real connectivity and affirmation.