cortney andrews

today we were quite fortunate to have Cortney Andrews visit the department. Cortney graduated from KCAI with a BFA in photography in 2005 and got her MFA at RISD in 2007. she currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

i had seen her work before, particularly Eros & Thanatos on the ARTwall in Power & Light:


& also on i heart photograph. but this was my first time seeing a lot of her work all at once, and my first time hearing her talk about it.



here's some notes i took while she was talking:

[on the subject of hiding her face in much of her recent work] with the face it's too specific... acknowledges & denies the viewer's desire to see what is hidden... denying certain parts, revealing as much as possible, but leaving it to their [the viewer's] imagination what's real and what's not.
changing wigs and costumes - constantly shaping identity. contradictions, multiple narratives [in her work]
showing the subject's need & desire to be looked at ... the lover attempting to be the beloved.

re-creating, re-staging, re-claiming nudes by being the female subject.

in each image, she is performing.. for a camera. thinking about performing for people in a space instead.
video- like making photos move. but they're two different things. Video is more like one complete thing - photos build on each other.
video -let the camera go.

don't put full videos on the internet.


i don't know if these notes mean anything to anybody besides me. but there they are..



here's some more images from Cortney Andrews.








and of course you can see more at cortneyandrews.com



there are some pretty obvious similarities between her work and mine. she uses herself as her main model. she creates alternative identities for herself. she creates false realities. female nudes. concealing the face. that's just a few obvious things.

austin and i were also able to talk to cortney about the work we did together with the Manhattan Project, and i hope to be able to talk with her further through emails.



another thing she mentioned was that her recent work is often somewhat fetishistic - showing just limbs, hair, of women.
it's a pretty big coincidence that the other day i took this image of myself, all limbs and hair -

i have more from that afternoon, i may post later.



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