Holes are potentially voyeuristic, but are you the voyeur or is someone spying in on you? There seems to be a forbidden danger to holes, something we should be instinctually afraid of, yet we are still drawn to. Holes can also be very sexual things. I make holes because I want to see past the photography, through the photography. What’s on the other side of the mirror? The viewer may be drawn to them aesthetically, or, as a person suffering from Trypophobia, filled with disgust or fear. Lucio Fontana, whose work inspired my interest in exploring the sculptural space between the canvas and the wall, the hidden spaces in between and behind the traditional surface image, once said: “I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface.” I challenge “the old pictorial formulae” and “the prison of the flat surface”, but of photography instead of painting. Using sculptural intervention and decollage, I question photographic conventions of materiality, scale, and the devotion to the paper print. I consciously combine and appropriate conventions from other mediums such as painting to defy categorization.
By drilling holes into a photograph of a door with holes I also turn it back into the object to which the image refers. The work is a paradox of being both an indexical image and the same material object it represents. If trypophobia is the disgust or fear of patterns of holes, then the artistic labor of drilling thousands of holes to find desire on the other side becomes an act of suffering but also an act of penance for doing so.