Double Life
Since 2001, the American photographer Kelli Connell has been working on “Double Life”, a series that has brought her under the spotlight of international attention. In “Double Life”, Connell explores the way her private experience and observation of relationships can be reconstructed and enacted before the camera, assuming thereby the value of an external codified photographic object. Connell’s images portray the same character enacting two roles in a single scenario. To create this juxtaposition in the final photograph, the artist scans, stitches and then digitally manipulates various medium format negatives in Adobe Photoshop. This allows her to build a chronicle that appears to be documenting the relationship of a fictitious couple of young women consisting essentially of Connell and her alter ego.
Seemingly bred on a documentary-like naturalism, “Double Life” dwells between fiction and veracious enactment. By means of this incessant sliding towards two opposite poles, the “constructed realities” Connell fosters do not solely seek to unveil her own dilemmas as subject matter and artist before the camera, but also address the overall baggage of responses and preconceptions we carry as viewers and as avid consumers of fictions. By taking as its starting point a strong autobiographic hint – the presumable sexual identity of Connell and her own experiences – the series goes further to give way to broader assumptions of identity, projected beliefs and other social clichés, reinforced in today’s visual culture by a vast network of media agents, such as television, film, advertising, not to mention art photography itself.
Kelli Connell’s conceptual core practice bears a marked affinity with Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills”. Her images lack the dramatic glamour and over-stylization encountered in Sherman’s case. They are, instead, impregnated with a lighter, more natural mood, appropriate to the mundane ethos of our times. Still, as the “Film Stills”, Connell’s staged scenes seem to be similarly derivative of no specific source, of no original. They contain all and nothing at the same time. They constitute texts open to interpretation and envisioning, easy to fit in the delights and burdens of the individual eye. What they ultimately ask from us, the viewers, is to misrecognize them. They ask us to acknowledge them for their misleading nature, namely for what they are not: an autobiography without fiction and a fiction without autobiographical elements. In this sense, Connell’s pictures jettison the key role photographs have traditionally occupied as material testimonies of life in the construction of emotive intimate diaries and in the preservation of the artist’s myth. The statement here is clear: there seems to be no concrete self behind these pictures, but instead various hallucinatory states of a constantly shifting mood. In fact, Connell’s pictures seem to reconfirm the very contribution of photography to this chimera. Rather than documenting, photographs are here rendered mere performative acts, potentially healing, self-revealing and tormenting at the same time, as if a cult was taking place before our eyes for the exorcising of personal ghosts, fears and other private demons. Above all, photography – understood as the act of taking pictures – becomes here a projection not of a “factual” past, but instead, of a so-to-speak believable set of imagined relationships that are not meant to be lived but rather to be contemplated, while coming from the confinement of the mind out to the world – as if, during this ongoing moment, it were not the world itself that matters to both the photographer and the viewers, but instead the experience of its dreamful reflection through the mirrors of the mind.
But let us go back to the physical economy of representation and narration as established in “Double Life”. The photographs of the series claim to describe various moments in the life of a couple. Yet, by watching these pictures closely, by going through their arranged serial sequence that supposedly illustrates the way these two alter egos interact over the years, we are confronted with a paradox. We constantly feel compelled to wonder what exactly these two characters are: twofold derivatives of the same person, or just two completely autonomous beings?
Time, the changing haircuts, styles and expression, the infantile masculine element in certain pictures contrasted with the womanly soap-opera-like emotive touch of others, uncover two doubles, complete and incomplete at the same time, who resist becoming exposed as two solidified beings in reality. As the narrative flows, against our strong temptation, we fail to identify who is the male and who is the female, who is active and who is passive. In each picture, roles and identities switch and the politics of power are reinvented. Connell’s diegesis undergoes various slips, obstructing any identification process, as if the artist’s sole wish were to exclude us from viewing her as an integral whole. The mirror is irremediably broken; or, perhaps, it has never worked in the first place. Human lives and stories have never been static and, insofar fixed identities are chimeras, photographs become nothing but ghostly objects, that is to say, nebulous apparitions of encounters that had never meant to take place anywhere but in the corners of the mind.
Critics have described this schizoid element imbuing “Double Life” as a duality in representation – the duality of the masculine and the feminine, the rational and the irrational, the exterior and the interior, the motivated and the resigned self. But, as it has been shown, this duality in question seems to dissolve into a million pieces. For we carry many facets and faces. Over the years our cellules are renovated and this results to us being materially distinct bodies. If Sherman’s “Film Stills” exposed this multiplicity of the self without any concrete analogue, their very simulacral condition derives from the performance of the artist’s recognisable opaque presence in the picture. We know that beneath Sherman’s disguises, there is a solidified self, besides a solid myth to deconstruct and a historical illusion to twist. By contrast, in Connell’s naturalised tableaux, this very physical self is multiplied, dismembered and finally diffused. Here, the subject matter, namely the body summoning its memory, emerges as an artificial construct, present and absent at the same time. This creates an unstable and unsettling field of representation. All that is seemingly believable and real has never occurred.
For once more, one would logically presume that all is about the woman as this under-exposed ‘Other’ in visual iconography. And yet, to claim this, to place Connell and her work under the scope of a cross-gender discourse or under a reading of human relationships in their universality, would simply be delimitating. In “Double Life”, the act of cancelling the matrix, that is to say the subject-artist in her physicality performing the photographed subject matter, addresses a broader range of questions regarding the processes and the mechanisms of perception in today’s visual culture. Even if there is an original of the self, we, as viewers today, are unable to perceive it. The notions of clones, digital manipulation and the aesthetic of reality-shows condition us irremediably at the moment of perception. Following on this, here the signifier becomes a ghost to our eyes, a replica – an artificial construct in the first place. There is nothing to demystify, neither the story carrier (subject matter - artist) nor its myth (“the questioning of personal dilemmas”). Resembling advertising, the work of Kelli Connell seems to be embedded on an empty message, which exists insofar it becomes the image itself. In the midst of it, photography appears as we know it today –a photography performing its openness as a consternation of bare signifiers…
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in 1000 Words 6/November 2009
