D(L)iminal Man, Photography Based Biological Imaging Portraits

D(L)iminal Man submits the self to the same biological logic the practice applies to everything else.

Color negatives — self-portraits — are selectively masked and buried in soil for extended periods. The microbes, the mineral deposits, the chemical reactions of oxidation and decay process the image according to their own logic, without instruction and without the possibility of correction. What is retrieved is not what was buried. The figure that emerges — coral and crimson where chemistry occurred, creamy mineral deposits, black voids where emulsion was entirely consumed, horn-like formations and spinal extensions that grew in darkness — is the result of a collaboration the artist cannot control and cannot predict.

The series is the practice turned inward. The dodo was submitted to the question of what remains when a presence is gone. The museum specimen was submitted to the question of what preservation actually preserves. Here the artist submits himself — his own image, his own surface — to the same entropic process, and retrieves whatever the earth decides to return.

The threshold the practice has always investigated — between animal and human, between presence and absence, between the made and the grown — runs directly through these portraits. The D(L)iminal Man is neither the person who was photographed nor the biological object that emerged from the soil. He is the evidence of the passage between.