EXOGENOUS 1

Digital image: Julie Clarke, 1999

This is one of the digitally manipulated images from an exhibition I held at the Public Office, West Melbourne, Australia in 1999. The exhibition was entitled Exogenous, which means 'Caused or produced by factors external to a model, organism, organization, or system'. I chose this title because there was so much emphasis placed upon endogenous causes for an individuals behaviour or the diseases they may have acquired. There was a continuing emphasis placed on their personal psychology or genetic code, thus inscribing them from the inside. Somehow this made them responsible for what happened to them in their lives! I wanted to subvert this notion, proposing instead that there are many external factors that we have no control over, which affect our lives. I was also attempting to subvert the notion of perfection, instilled in us in many ways from when we are children.

In order to attempt this I scanned photographs of myself taken at various times in my life and overlaid them in Photoshop with photographs of female members of my family. I purposely constructed the faces so that they would look unusual, rather than attempting to correct any faults or undesirable qualities that may have occurred in the overlaying. I called this image above, Stone face, mainly because the photograph of my great great grandmother was quite old and when overlaid onto my representation, it did tend to make the resulting image quite pock faced and stilted, affording it a seriousness that was not in either of the faces prior to them being hybridised. The image perfectly showed how the face is like a mask.

The notion of the grotesque informs the work. Indeed many people who viewed these images saw them as quite horrific in one way or another, but were equally attracted and repelled. The artworks also attempted to address social policies instigation by the eugenics movement. I became fascinated by such statements as 'She must be feebleminded because she is pretty!', or that those who were poor, were also considered criminals. When I study the image (above), I am taken back to Nathanel Kahn's film My Architect (2003) and think of the skin on the face of his father Louis I. Kahn and how noticeably marked it was. Amazingly enough the exterior of many of Kahn's buildings have a pocked surface, somehow reflecting that aspect of himself that he presented every day to the world.