Interview by Sydney Bejcar

 

SB: What ideas and artists currently inspire you to create art?

 

SC: The human body has now long been a great source of inspiration for my work, specifically the skin and flesh. I am mesmerized by the body’s ability to at once both attract and repulse, to enlighten and confound. There are many artists whose works inspire my practice. To name a few: Mona Hatoum, Helen Chadwick, Anne De Vries, Chantal Gervais, and Daniel Canogar. I also place a great deal of importance on theory my practice. Notions of abjection, posthumanism and Jungian theory are among some of the areas of research I have thus far explored in my work.

 

SB: Why do you work with this medium? Is it the only, the better, or just one of the many methods of manifesting your visual ideas?

 

SC: There is a certain immediacy obtainable with photography that I find most captivating. I do not consider photography any lesser or better than any other medium, but it is one that I feel best fits with my current practice.

 

SB: So as a photographer, do you find you are more interested in the camera for its illusionary potential or its ability to capture "objective truths"?

 

SC: Its capacity to record elements of the real in such immense detail, yet also for its concurrent capability to create tensions between fact and fiction, render photography a medium to which I am inherently attracted.

 

SB: Much of your work seems to play with the aestheticization of subjects that may otherwise be perceived as grotesque. How does the visual relationship between attraction and repulsion function in your photography? Do you strive for a balance between push/pull, delectable/distasteful, humour/ horror?

 

SC: Although dichotomies such as push/pull, attraction/repulsion are often characteristics of my work, I do not strive per se to assure their balance. In other words, those dichotomies are not what I have in mind when creating my works. However, for my ongoing interest of the relationship between the body and the psyche, it is important for me to create images that will evoke an emotions and or thoughts in the viewer that may not otherwise be felt from more traditional representations of the body. I am interested in why certain depictions of the body incite certain strong reactions while others not so intensely. A final note on this topic however: from the beginning of my short photographic practice, it has been very important that the ways in which I represent the body not speak directly to a violence or abuse of the body nor its exploitation.

 

SB: What does a “combined self” mean to you? Is identity formed by a multitude of perspectives? Is it ever-evolving? Fragmented?

 

SC: This is a question I could spend the rest of my life researching, studying and perhaps never reach a certain answer. At the moment however, I feel that a “combined self” reflects perhaps more appropriately the notion of an ‘ever-shifting self’. I do believe that, indeed, identity is formed by a multitude of elements – perspectives, emotions, conscious and unconscious experience. This last element, the unconscious life, is something that is piquing my interest more and more every day in my practice. The conscious self, the here and now, is such a small fraction of who were are, but it is what we know, right now. Nevertheless, there is an abyss of unconscious thought and experience that is flowing in and out of our right now conscious life, it is affecting us whether we realize it or not. For this reason alone, I believe that the self is never so easily defined.