This video continues my inquiry into war photo journalism and the abundance of madonna & child imagery that I began tracking in the late 1990’s with sculptural photo work titled, Balkan Madonnas. “Every war is a war against children” said the founder of the “Save the Children“ organization, 100 years ago.

The current video iteration uses the structure of an anti-war folk song written by Pete Seeger in 1955, expanded by Joe Hickerson in 1960: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” I commissioned musician Keeghan Schneck to create a punk-inspired update of the song, which brings a rhythmic urgency to the living nightmares facing nations and people around the world as they contend with conflicts escalated by massive influxes of weapons courtesy the international military industrial complex. It is a not just a lament about the horrors of war but the role that photographs—made with the best of intentions— play in the manufacturing of consent to perpetuate the endless cycles of profiting from death and destruction.

(With animation and editing assistance of KU Bierman Grant recipients Sophie Morrison and Becca Leigh.)

Like Disaster is the final video of the Murderous Grin |The Monster is Me The Monster is You trilogy— a short, late-capitalist re-reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” in which the speaker is both consumer and consumed. As an artist/citizen, in addition to politics and protest, I make art to engage with the body politic, express my anger and shed my despair over the confluence of societal recklessness and personal loss. Made with support from Kutztown University Bierman Grants, this trilogy of videos can be shown on a large-scale monitor or projected much larger, directly onto gallery walls. Recently exhibited at Scotts Mills Gallery, East Falls, Philadelphia and in a short animation festival at The Goggleworks in Reading, PA. (With assistance of KU animation interns Jessica F. Eason, Mary Engel and Lauren Mickley.)

In this second video of the Murderous Grin | The Monster is Me, the Monster is You trilogy, I use x-rays of teeth in tandem with song and folktale to explore the smokescreen of consumer culture and the need for discernment between appearances and what is true. The metaphor of the mouth includes the charm and menace of these “damned dazzling smiles” and the need for reflection and awareness as we engage what seems harmless. The struggle between substance and subterfuge looms large in my work.

In the video The Bite, the x-ray functions as an oracle mouthing a warning issued by Brecht and Weill in their song Mack the Knife and as the barely disguised culprit in the folktale conversation between Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.

While working in the darkroom making photographic collages using teeth x-rays for Carnivore Smirks ,(http://www.leighkane.com/#/eastward-avenue/) I envisioned a mouth made of disembodied teeth reciting William Blake’s poem, The Smile. Ten years later, funded in part by a Kutztown University Bierman Mentorship Grant, I worked with animation intern Jess Eason to make the multi-gendered and voiced narrator of The Smile (2019). It is the first video of a trilogy: Murderous Grin | The Monster is Me, The Monster is You.

The duality of smiles— their power for seduction and deception— and the necessity for discernment is something visionary artist & poet William Blake (1757-1827) explored so succinctly and beautifully in his poem, still fresh and relevant today. Smiles play a central communicative role in our lives from infancy and people in my corner of the world don a smile reflexively when a camera is present. Beyond the smile itself, I am drawn to the mouth and teeth as metaphors of consumption in our endlessly acquisitive consumer culture.

I began these making these camera-less images (photograms) in 2010, working directly with light on photo paper, pairing ripped fragments of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art with Sears house plans from throughout the 20th century. I loved Bishop’s commingling of lost personal objects and romantic love— but I couldn’t resolve the images or series. Resurrected in 2018, I added patent drawings from the National Archives of oddball and ordinary personal & domestic items from across the 20th & 21st centuries and combined them with Bishop’s words. The new pairings of Bishop’s poem fragments and object drawings created a bleak vision of desire and the toll of our unmoored appetites in consumer culture.

“Mr. Lovelies~ Some Gentle Men* Considered Fondly” are pictures of men* I know well—in close proximity to plants, animals, people, water, earth and sky. I observe them coexisting rather than at war with the natural world. The resulting photos challenge binary gender assumptions and covertly pose a visual challenge to essentialist notions of women’s primary and unique connection to nature.

 In this ongoing series, I narrow my observations to a few distinctive gestures and markings, deeply familiar to me from time I spend and have spent in with the men in my life.  I find nuances of connectedness between my subjects and the natural world, and between the men I photograph and myself. Like Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences,” these are elemental relationships brimming with possibilities and sometimes fraught with hazards.

 (Photos from this series have been exhibited at Black Box Gallery in Portland, OR; Minneapolis Photo Center in MN; and at Shala Yoga House in NYC, NY.  They’ve been published in two exhibition catalogs: “Color: The Revolution,” and “The Portrait: Up Close and Personal” and in an exhibition reviewby Mary Abbe: “Portraits: About Face,”  in the Minneapolis Star Tribune August 2, 2012.)

*and masculine-identified & gender non-conforming folx

.

Visions of light in my little corner of the world—varied, soft-focus images of spectacle and potential catastrophe. I made a couple of frames from this encounter into tri-color gum bichromate prints at Maine Media Workshop. I didn’t fall in love with that process or the results but the people and place were inspiring and the combination of solitude and camaraderie was helpful. (5 x 7” archival ink jet prints)

The library at University of Maryland Baltimore County acquired an archive of 8 x 10” glass negatives—some in various states of decay—made by the Hughes Company, a photographic firm active in Baltimore (1900-1940). Through the Society for Photographic Education, artists were given access to high-quality scans of the negatives and invited to reinterpret these portraits and slices of life from the early 20th century, which were exhibited at UMBC during the 2014 S.P.E. national conference The Kuhn library at UMBC maintains the archive of 3000 glass negatives: http://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/hughes They also host an online archive of the artist-altered images: https://hughes-remix.tumblr.com/

The stars of “Carnivore Smirks” are the expressive and, for me, endlessly intriguing x-rays of teeth. After a lifetime of bad teeth and watching dentists examine these haunting pictures before plying their terrifying trade, I procured a pile of anonymous, real film! dental x-rays from a generous local dentist. I can’t help myself—I am fascinated by all things photographic including medical imaging technologies.

The metaphor of the mouth includes the charm and menace of these “damned dazzling” smiles.  The duality of smiles, their power for seduction and deception and the necessity for discernment is something William Blake explored in his poem, The Smile.  Smiles play a central communicative role in our lives from infancy and people in my corner of the world don a smile reflexively when a camera is present. Beyond the smile itself, I am drawn to the mouth and teeth as metaphors of consumption in our primarily consumer culture. (LRR: What big teeth you have… BBW: The better to eat you with!)

William Blake was my guide as I worked in the red light of the black & white darkroom to produce these gelatin silver collages. Even the light-sensitive materials I employ become opportunities to consider matters of darkness and light in our inner and outer worlds. I add to this series periodically when I need a break from the computer and want to return to working directly with x-rays & small amounts of light, while splashing & scampering around a darkened room.

Short series or singular images, some made for commissions or upon invitation for specific exhibitions or as ancillary material for longer series.

Digital collages and a short video about gender and color preferences; nature vs. nurture; parenting, patriarchy and horticulture.

A three-part installation in an empty former Bethlehem Steel office building, now the Fowler Center in Bethlehem, PA. Part I: All in a Row: Sunbonnet Sue Quilt; Part II: Column of Queries, text scratched into a rainbow of house paint stripes; Part III: Who Might She Be? Hand-colored vintage office worker photo.

Although the last scraps of the steel mills are the hulking, high-profile ghosts in this former industrial town, in the office buildings it’s the women office workers whose absence haunted me: office buildings of empty rooms, rows and rows of vacated seats. Digging through the archives of office worker photos from the late nineteenth century to the present, I found this photo of women workers at their desks. Zoomed in, I saw individual women—their facial expressions, clothing, hairstyles and postures. I imagined their prospects and what they hoped and dreamed and thought of the people who loved and depended on them.

The landscape of the face can be a minefield for anyone, but for women facing mid-life it can seem particularly treacherous, when usefulness & youthfulness, productivity and reproductive capabilities are conflated. As I faced my own middle age I began to notice the panoply of ads for miracle creams and cosmetic surgery nipping at my digital heels, offering solutions to the problem of lines and wrinkles but clearly avoiding the bigger fact of mortality itself. For insight and perspective about how to age with dignity I studied 500 years of western artists’ self portraits, focusing on those made by artists aged 40-50+.  I found great solace among the solemn, frightened, mournful, arrogant but rarely smiling faces of artists looking closely at themselves. 

            Begun at a residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA in 1997 I chose a selection of the most psychologically revealing self-portraits by artists such as Antonin Artaud at 39, Claus Oldenburg at 40, Kathe Kollwitz at 44, David Hockney at 46 and Maurice Quentin de La Tour at 47 and layered them over my own portraits at similar ages.  Creating digital face-grafts instead of plans for cosmetic surgery, I wrestled with the vanity historically thrust upon women. It was a stimulating return to the history of art after many years engaged with photographic imagery from popular culture. The only images I’ve exhibited from this series are the Artaud collages, included in exhibitions at The New York Academy of Sciences in Manhattan, The Print Center in Philadelphia and Colgate University, among other locations.

Eight months pregnant with my second child--I faced a big life upheaval. The series of digital collages called “Cut to the Quick” emerged directly from dream imagery while simultaneously embracing new life and facing mid-life, maternity and mortality. I fused the comfort of quilts and quilt patterns with self portrait snap-shots, cosmetic surgery promotional materials and other medical imagery, including photos of cadavers.

These are digital ruminations on the proliferation of body alterations that continue to gain popularity. As we cut and piece ourselves together, much as previous generations created quilts or other craft works, we use the skills of cosmetic surgeons and others to change our physical selves, attempting to comply with gender stereotypes about youth and beauty or defy the limitations placed on us by narrow ideas of gender.

The visual effect of this work is at once decorative, disturbing and occasionally profound. The intensity and messiness of birth and the tenderness of time with my new daughter led to a phase of life and art-making I thought of as Motherhood and Mayhem. Pregnancy and birth ennobled a certain fearlessness and the work I made during this time reflects this.

Part I. When we left Minnesota we rented a house on a farm in Pennsylvania wedged between verdant rolling hills and a screaming interstate highway. Eros and Thanatos could be encountered daily, often walking hand in hand as we tried to keep our young children safe but also grant them freedom to explore. Dichotomies abounded: answering the quiet invitation of woods, fields and streams and buying bright orange hats to avoid being shot by hunters. Delighting in the endless supply of barn kittens to chase or cuddle and bidding farewell to our beloved old cat Floyd. Lingering by the algae clogged pond to ponder or skip stones and dreading that our toddler might slip beneath the water’s thick green surface and drown. The hospital became a familiar destination as we weathered all manner of calamities including a grand mal seizure, two broken arms, minor surgeries and a biopsy.

Part II. Hunting season arrived soon after we settled in. With Eli Lotar’s 1920’s abattoir photographs in mind, I collected and photographed deer feet—the only part of the animal I could rescue after the rest was processed. Eventually, I felt an affinity with the hunters, who expressed their love of the natural world through hunting. I saw the potential of parental love suffocating children, causing more harm than good. I came to feel we were kindred spirits the hunters and me, seeking to possess that which cannot be owned.

An ode to the monumentality of relationships between women, romantic and/or platonic, using language (girlfriend!) to blur those boundaries. Ten 16” diameter portraits of my girlfriends (wth dates of the commencement of the relationship) on the flower-shaped frames; each surrounded by candy-shaped frames with 8 x 10” snaps of their girlfriends. (Chromogenic prints in custom MDF frames.)

In the early 1990”s, “family values” politicians and religious extremists demonized and challenged the human rights of people who did not conform to their conservative views. I found it necessary to protest the bigotry and hatred they used and continue to use, as their weapon. My goal was to commemorate and MAKE VISIBLE the extra-familial people who help to make daily life possible and wonderful for millions of people like me. United by necessity, desire and shared struggle, our families include not only spouses and blood relatives but also friends, lovers, children and helpmates and these chosen or invented families are bound by emotion, economics and/or a shared world-view.

Participants include nuclear families and their helpers, step and blended family members, and those who live in group homes or alone but in close affiliation with others. They were located via word of mouth, posted flyers and on alternative-family forums on the Internet. Without a travel budget for the project, I invited and paid for interested family groups to to use department store and commercial portrait studios, which created an opportunity for discussions about what makes a family.

Families sent me a 5 x 7” print which I then framed, rephotographed and significantly enlarged to 30 x 40.” In Guardian Angels I used family photos to expose the hypocrisy of the family values moment and celebrate the actual guardian angels many of us rely on for help and love.

25 chomrogenic portraits on cintra; 50” framed text portraits; exhibited at Manhattan Marymount College and White Columns in NYC; Temple Gallery in Philadelphia and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN.

As a person with a full-time job and a young child, I found myself the target of multivalent advertising campaigns: shelter magazines, clothing and housewares catalogs and direct mail from credit card companies, all attempted to draw me (& my generation) into conspicuous consumption and ever-expanding debt, while hawking a fantasy of “home.” Yuppies may have been buying McMansions, but for most folks I knew, two incomes or more were necessary just to afford the basics and pay off student loans. At the same time, “working women” were increasingly blamed for the failings of the American family and possibly for the end of Western Civilization. (NOT to blame? 10+ years of trickle-down Reaganomics and stagnant wages; failure to support working families with parental leave and affordable daycare.)

I sought a form to commingle appropriated advertising imagery and my own photos—and conjured these hybrid window-box/mantle forms on which to perch the images. Each unit contained a fluorescent tube to illuminate a series of chromogenic prints on Duratrans—a translucent photo material used for bus-stop advertising. Each of the six parts is between 30-55” long and 20” high (including photos) and 8” deep; with a total of 21 Duratrans prints mounted on plexi. [The writer Andre Codrescu came through a gallery where this project was on view and told me the work was engaging and operatic, and thought I should be making movies. He was probably right.]

Aggravating Gender—that was my mantra, my mission and the eventual title of an exhibition of mixed media works shown at Carleton College and Colgate University that included this group of 11 x 14” gelatin silver prints. I started with vintage b+w photographs from flea markets and cast-offs from portrait studios. I re-photographed details of male faces and bodies with a (non-gendered) desirous gaze, using a film camera. I added digitally-generated text: soft words usually associated with female subjects and a round mask to emphasize voyeurism, which I photographed and printed to film and then combined with the negatives in multiple-exposure darkroom collages. Within a few years these could be made in minutes with PhotoShop. But at the time I made these silver beauties with love and labor in the darkroom, ink jet prints were dotty and impermanent things.

Portraits of anonymous boys and men from across the 20th century (flea market finds and portrait studio discards) paired into imaginary implied relationships: neighbors, friends, fathers and sons, brothers, lovers. I rephotographed the men and printed them soft-focus in the darkroom with a text encircling each portrait: “He wanted to love him, but he could not. He wanted to touch his cheek, caress the soft skin of his earlobe, and tell him stories of an injured boyhood…but he could not.” The pairs hang together in custom-made MDF tombstone-shaped frames.

This project about men and expressions of intimacy was conceived soon after the birth of my son, when I was confronted by the tough-guy banter directed at him even as a newborn: [“Hey—he’s gonna be a bruiser!” “Hi there big fella!”) I wanted to suggest the debilitating effects of sexism and rigid gender expectations on men and boys, not just women. In particular, these appropriated photos are an elegy for the lost opportunities for affection between American men and the pressure they face to restrain their most tender emotions, especially with one another.

A three-part conceptual study of women and work that considered the subjects’ varying degrees of intimacy with the photographer (friend, neighbor, co-worker), the intrusiveness of documentary photography and the subject’s preference (or not!) for a dress portrait. 14 chromogenic prints, 3 color X-ray photograms & 3 text panels.