Claire A.
Warden

Mimesis

Mimesis engages questions of identity, representation, illegibility, and language through abstraction and experimental image-making. The creation of my work comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar is pervasive in our culture. When looking at my series Mimesis, the urge to ask "what is it?" echoes the question, "what are you?" – a question directed to me countless times as a person of color with a diverse ethnocultural heritage. This work resists definition as well as the hegemonic gaze and, instead, emphasizes opacity and illegibility. Through this work, I can subvert the historical problematics of representation and agency in photography, particularly in addressing experiences had by people of color. For this reason, I believe it is important to know that this work is photographic—cameraless photographs—and that I developed a cameraless process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter—thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.