The House Looks Back
Artist Statement
For The House Looks Back, I combine the mediums of painting and photography to replicate memory, spiritualism, and cinematic horror. It is my intention to replicate the haunting that is memory and how it affects us psychologically. The driving force behind The House Looks Back is the idea that our memories act as ghosts haunting the present; memories are entities of people and places of the past.
My process of manipulating images and reprocessing through paint is a way of visually depicting memories of my childhood in Pennsylvania. These particular memories of my first home, or to argue what I associate my memories to be via childhood photographs, demonstrate the theory of hauntology in relationship to the haunted house trope within horror. The home is often associated with harboring the energies of the deceased, and can be viewed as a vessel for energies left behind. This home holds a duality of both comfort and trauma, and also the “haunting” of its presence in my dreams.
Paint added to a photo’s surface makes each one unique and adds to the conversation of painting and photography’s relationship. The link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people, through the application of paint it disrupts traditional connotations of photography and becomes less mortal.
This practice also expands my contextual ideas around the application of paint and use of color. My own personal techniques of painting a spirit by use of color to reference aura, I work similarly to a medium to visually represent what I understand to be the presence of ectoplasm.
