I Want To Believe

I Want To Believe takes its title from a tagline popularized by the UFO community and the television series The X-Files. Stripped of that context, these "truth seeker" phrases turn ambiguous, which is the tension the work lives in. It is the first portrait in Pray. Prey., a series of mixed-media works built from layered photographs and light.

In the image a woman looks upward, bathed in light. Because of the layering effect we see three hands arranged in the position of a triangle. Her right wrist is tattooed with a musical note and she clutches a bouquet of dried flowers. In her left hand she holds an apple by its stem, at her fingertips. An alien head is tattooed on her right leg.

The photograph for this piece was taken at Marienstraße 9, in the former apartment of Frau Müller, who had recently passed away. Traces of her life remained inside the home: old letters left in the coal oven, a walking cane resting against the hallway wall. The rose-patterned, GDR-era wallpaper was charming and reminiscent of another era, and I wanted to transport it elsewhere and preserve it. I was fascinated by the idea of using her wallpaper to make a new wallpaper, holding onto some essence of an apartment that had been marked for major renovation and I knew it was only a matter of time before this apartment would be lost to time.

The portrait is composed of two photographs: a black-and-white layer made of 74 Xerox photocopies, and a color layer carried by three LED lightboxes. The black-and-white image is glued directly to the wall like wallpaper, and the color lightboxes are hung on top of it.

Working with lightboxes lets me reference both popular culture (the illuminated signs of movie theaters and advertising) and the sense of scale I admire in classical painting. As three-dimensional objects the lightboxes take on a sculptural presence, and the installed portrait glows like a stained-glass window. Because the model holds a slightly different pose in the black-and-white layer than in the color layer, the figure seems to shift; the final image hovers between the surface of the wall and the 2.5 cm depth of the box.