The saturation of youth-centric images and narratives in American popular culture, along with longer lives and diminished roles for older people, have contributed to a profound invisibility of the old – particularly aging women. This photographic work seeks ways to recover visibility through care and negotiation between the beholder and the beheld. The project recalls the paradox of our cultural attraction to structures that are in decay while we find ways of masking the aging of the body.
Traditional poses of the young, female figure throughout western art history have been reimagined with the artist’s mother as subject, in an effort to reclaim and expand the dominant culture’s ideal to one that encompasses the wholeness of life.