My work develops from thinking about ways photographic imagery can enter formal, sculptural, and material relevance. I am interested in ways the body intersects with form, often proposing an antithetical to the indexical nature of photography. Meditating and thinking about photography is a rich source of inspiration for me. I am drawn to the self-reflexivity of photography. The recording of a trace. Its precarious position as a record-keeper and archive, as well as its ability to sting as we acknowledge our own ambivalence with time.
There are politics of embodiment and looking, which are at the core of my work.
My sister is my model and I use her because she is physically similar to me. She becomes a stand-in for myself, which allows for my simultaneous position as viewer and object. For me, photography is abundant in its association with desire and affectation. In viewing, desire is initiated. Conversely, desire unearths self-consciousness as one views oneself from the position of the other. This mirroring is something that is unique to photography, as it invites our participation as we imagine ourselves objects of the gaze.
My family immigrated from Iran to Ohio when I was very young. I live with a hyperawareness of my body, which I attribute to growing up thinking of it as a politically charged location. For me, the body is a site that is both familiar and strange. Due to COVID, we are all in a different relationship with our bodies and have new boundaries and protocol as to how we move through space. This loss of freedom feels like something I was already negotiating from a young age. For me, the body becomes a site of stratified consciousness. Assemblage becomes a metaphor for this.
I have been making works using silver gelatin photographs, ceramic, string, and other ephemera. I am interested in exploring my own subjectivity through a vocabulary of various objects, photographs, and associations made between these items. The taxonomy of images includes the figure as well as objects (sometimes nameable, sometimes not) found in the home or studio. For me, string has an association with time and what was once traditional women’s work. It also carries an association with mapping or guiding (think of Ariadne saving Theseus by providing her love with a sword and a ball of thread so he could retrace his way out of the labyrinth of the Minotaur). Ceramic and wood pieces become appendages and, in essence, finish the body like an exquisite corpse. There is a structural dependence between the frame (which I make in studio) and the interior image. The container and contained existing in equilibrium.
In viewing art, we search for meaning based on established knowledge systems that may or may not prove knowable. This is the beauty of art! To try to give meaning to the unimaginable or language to the unknowable.
I am always working to create a vocabulary that can exist outside of language. Image, object, gesture, and form establishing a syntax of meaning and enabling an establishment of trust, allowing ultimate freedom in my practice.
This article was originally published in the Art Basel Miami Beach 2021 magazine, guest-edited by Xaviera Simmons.
Sheree Hovsepian is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
Top image: Sheree Hovsepian, The Commons (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.