untitled selves

statement

Frank Rodick, 2018

Written for the exhibition Untitled Selves: New Work by Frank Rodick, The School of Image Arts, Toronto, 2018.

It lasted years, not months; and during that long season of falling apart I watched those last waves of stardust sweep through my parents, breaking them into pieces. It took long enough never to stop, and so little time it was ash before it began.

It was my season for watching, and I forgot how to sleep. I did things I'd never done, like make pictures of that sorry little trio we were, that we'd always been. First came the pictures of Frances, my mother. A few years work on that, and then the portraits of my father, Joseph. a lonely man who grieved he might not outlive us all. I spent more time poring over his pictures than I ever spent on the man when he was alive. 

Squeezed in there somewhere was another discovery: old snapshots packed into one more old shoebox, three pictures of a smooth-bellied four year old boy standing naked in a bathtub. The boy was long gone, but I'd been taught to recognize him as me. I blew up that thin white body, turned him inside out; I christened my churnings with flash powder and cold water, and called the pictures everything will be forgotten.

There were times I grandly imagined myself some Nietzschean figure, watching death do its dirty work — at least as it played out in ICUs and dementia wards where ninety-year-old women played with dolls and screamed about concentration camps. But all I really managed was to keep my eyes open. And take notes. I paid attention because I thought it was my duty, because I was curious though exhausted, and because it dawned on me that there might be a vein worth mining in all this. Artists — I've imagined myself one of those too — can be monsters, cold and surgical.

I'm sure that during this long season something broke inside me. Whatever that thing was, I know it wasn't whole in the first place. It was shot through with enough corrosion that a sour breath could make it crumble.

Maybe that's how I wound up making these pictures, the ones I’d call untitled selves. 

———

But I lie: symmetry, that's what got me going. I wanted pictures that would go neatly with the Frances and Joseph portraits. A tidy three-legged symmetry, nice on exhibition walls and book pages, something that mirrored our little band.

I started there and the pictures were predictably awful. Something elemental was wrong, or rather, missing. Creating a story — even something hallucinatory, gossamer-thin — felt wrong, because there was no story.

I was spent. So, how to make pictures of spent? How to make pictures of broken? Never mind how, because you don't know how. 

———

Eight months after completing untitled selves, I found this quote by John Gray: 

Who we are is something other than what we think. And that something is unknowable. So how do you ever represent that? A blank space? Maybe. Dots on a page coming together and flying apart? Maybe that too.

There was less of me after that long season. A wind tunnel comes to mind; not that I was living in one, but that I was a wind tunnel: some vacant, turbulent space, where undefinable bits of things crashed into each other, coagulating for a quantum moment, then flying apart.

Sometimes one of those nebulous clusters looked familiar, like a feeling I recognized, or a state of mind, or a sense of self, something with a name even: bewilderment, wonder, fear, hate, resignation, disgust, elation, alone. But the labels disintegrated even before things again came apart, leaving me not somewhere else, but someone else. Or nobody at all.

It’s obvious that the thing we call identity is changeable. But what that season of falling apart brought home was more elemental: that who we think we are is transient and impermanent to the point of pure illusion. 

———

Cutting was a relief.

To scrape, and winnow away the surfaces, to scratch out eyes and seal mouths shut, to blow things up, scattering them like powder. All of it a relief, though it took effort.

Three years earlier I did a dry run for this process with the everything will be forgotten and season of mists pictures. I made those images subtractively, chipping away at a plain of black surface to reveal what was below. Two-dimensional sculpting, I called it. Was it a coincidence that these earlier works were also self-portraits — unlike the portraits of Joseph and Frances, where the process was more additive? I doubt it, though I don’t think it matters either.

I eliminated colour. I considered text, then gave up on that. I discarded or crippled other elements that are often part of portraiture: background, pose, lighting, context, objects. What wasn't there was as definitional as anything that was. What was left I could move around as I pleased, like the white sands I remember those monks in Kyoto gently pushing with their rakes.

I sometimes say that my work beginning with the Frances pictures comprise an "alternative family album." But there's nothing in the last self-portraits that returns to my family. I wonder if I'm declaring rejection using that most deprecating of methods (in photography and life): erasure. 

And yet. The images remain clearly married to the human face, which along with the figure, have always been in my work. How's that? A man not quite ready to leave this world? Yes, though the threads are thinner now. Looking not only for what's gone, but also for what's left? Yes, that too.

Fear of leaving everything behind? Yes. For now.

It was tenuous, but I still felt a part of this world, an actor in this strange production... Just not a resident. More like a traveller, passing through. Dust.