Cristina Rojas-Moises
My work is narcissistic, always starting as a self-portrait, then it might be about you, and him, and her, and them, but always departing from me. This is because I have no idea what I look like (insert sob story about a decade-long crippling eating disorder), yet I used to always find myself with an unquenchable curiosity to see everything about me “clearly.” Such a futile quest for objectivity landed me at the feet of photography, a medium desperate to be a mirror but secretive about its flipped reflection. But it was in this lack, the gap between the thing and the almost thing, that I found the biggest freedom, being able to see both the photograph and the human body as a malleable and constantly redefined entity. I choose to embrace a medium that moves without forgiveness, suffocating truth within the boundaries of its frame. Unfortunately yet inevitably, we’ve neutered it, made it part of this world rather than an illusion of it.
My work encourages photography to reveal itself— not as a friend or guardian, but as a relentless hammer that will help you break anything, including yourself. In my work, the audience understands that they are looking at a photograph, but the image never offers legibility on a silver platter. Thus, my viewer always asks, is that an image? What is in the image? And why, if photography is supposed to hand us the world in the most digestible of forms (it is not), is this work not taking “full advantage” (ugh) of its mimetic qualities? By breaking polaroids, introducing foreign objects to the enlarger, using thread to create compositions, I emphasize the photograph as a tangible object that embraces spillage, contradictions, and confusion as a productive tool for looking and critiquing. My images are always a thing, even if they invite the recognition of a human form, the piece is always an evident object or texture that cannot be entirely abstracted.
Nonetheless, in the form of the photographic object I work with lividity. Without being able to work with life I engage with its remains, involving the audience in its funerary rite. They say Mexicans are obsessed with death, and maybe there is some truth to that, but I think it is less about the passing and more about our constant grappling with losses that are impossible to ignore. Because of this, viewing of my works requires movement that goes beyond a frontal stare; it asks you to look up, down, around, and across. I facilitate such interaction through fragmented photo series, non-traditional photographic installations, and scale variations; always involving the viewer’s body in a tradition of search and absence that stems from a collective grief.
All my work, now and in the future, is dedicated to my late uncle Moises (a relentless absence)
