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The father-son relationship is one rich with myth and metaphor. Our passage into, and through, adulthood is tied inextricably to our relationships with our parents and themes from the parent-child drama abound in the history of literary and visual depiction. Father/Son hopes to articulate aspects of this complex relationship through a staging of the two struggling personalities as heroic and mythic figures, recalling such paintings as Gaugin’s image of Jacob wrestling with the angel and Goya’s warring Titans.
Often the struggles which stem from the parent-child relationship continue to echo through our psyches and repeat themselves in our relationships with others. In these images, I touch on aspects of this struggle having to do with power, authority, sexuality, self-identity and how these determine the way we move through the world. I bring to the work ideas and feelings ranging from my personal history with my father to mythological stories, from my childhood memories to my adult struggles, from art history to psychology, from sexual experiences to religious iconography. The series alludes to the often hidden struggles and emotions which suffuse the father/son relationship.
The figures, myself and my father, engage in a variety of interactions – wrestling stances and others more intimate. Technically, these are taken from low-res video and post-processed to have a soft, painterly aura.
The two figures are suspended outside of the everyday, floating on a dark or tinted background in ambiguous spaces. The three composite murals add interior photographs of the house where I grew up and the curve of the photo studio backdrop shows through in a shadow-like fashion, hinting at the staging of the figures. The soft, painterly quality of the figures and the synthetic colour emphasizes a mythical/metaphorical reading rather than holding it grounded in a specific, photographic reality.
The Father/Son body of work includes a series of looped video works and animated projections. At the time, these were installed in the gallery space as seen in the rendering using small monitors and slide projectors.
