identity crisis redux

In 2017 I was a freshman at art school in a Photography 101 class. The final exam was an open ended one–-we could essentially do whatever we wanted as long as a photo was involved. Because I was petulant as hell and extremely bored of proving that I could expose a photo correctly, I decided that for my final project, I’d dress up in bizarre Party City drag and take photos of myself being as weird as I could muster in the school’s photo studio. I picked out my five favorites, edited and scanned them into oblivion, got little 4x6 glossy prints of them made, and named the series Identity Crisis. I had taken plenty of moody self portraits as a kid who was interested in photography but these were different–the moodiness was gone, I felt silly and stupid and free. The photos felt wonderfully frivolous–I couldn’t explain them neatly in an artist statement, but I knew I was having FUN. These photos and the spirit that they came from bled into all of the work I made in college–I started photographing real drag queens, I bought a couple (marginally) better wigs, and despite me taking my work very, very seriously, it got really fucking fun.

I graduated college about 7 months before the pandemic hit–I was living with my parents, not paying rent, and was frankly thrilled to have the time and headspace to work on weird stuff for fun. I hit my stride with Identity Crisis– I was shooting self portraits multiple portraits a week (I could cry reading this now, as someone who lives in one of the most expensive cities in the country…to have the time to do that…*nick jonas voice* “you don’t know what you got till it’s goOOoone”).

In 2022, after getting sick of having it so damn good, I up and moved to LA. However prudent a decision for me in the long term, the onslaught of Real Life Shit (and to be fair, also the pure excitement of figuring out where else my work could take me) took a significant portion of my attention away from making work Just For Me. I quickly slipped into a scarcity mindset in which no matter how much I kicked my personal projects down the line in favor of trying to make more money, I never felt like I’d done quite enough to allow myself to sit down and work on fun things…in my experience, I fall into a trap of never being able to accomplish enough–send enough cold emails, brainstorm enough commercially viable test shoots, etc–and day after day the personal projects slip further and further away.

Needless to say, Identity Crisis fell by the wayside, as did a lot of little experiments, my high concept personal shoots, etc. I was being creative in a lot of ways but not making the work that mattered most to me, which took a toll.

The toll in question: I’ve felt a lot of resistance to making personal work in the past year—feeling like I couldn’t trust myself to make the right decisions (conceptually, technically) and having a hard time reconciling the most wild (read: most Me) parts of my work with the commercial practice I’ve been trying to build. I often wondered if I was concepting something TOO outrageous to count as a commercial “test”…which is a wild inclination, maybe not for most folks, but certainly for me as someone whose most lucrative years (both financially and in terms of the quality of my art) have been my Freakiest years. But fear has been known to stifle a bitch!

That said, I’ve made the conscious decision the past month or so to focus a lot less on trying to change my work into something more “commercially viable” and a lot more on ~clearing my creative channels~ so I can make the crazy shit I need to make! Since I made that decision I have been in a FLOW. My ideas notebook is filling up and getting tattered. I’m cooking, as they say!!!! I’ve been having ideas as I’m falling asleep, while I’m driving, and I feel like my mojo is coming back. What’s so nutty about this is that my teenage self would read this and laugh, roll her eyes, and be like “you dumb bitch…..of course.” But the reality is that I have to stray a little to remember my MO.

This is all a really long winded way of telling you that I’ve made a new self portrait (the first real one in…like…3 years or so. it was the one at the top of this email!). And I have a bunch more in the works! And I’m feeling good!

Thanks for reading + more soon?! IDK!

Savana

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Also feels irresponsible not to mention that making this type of work is grounding and meaningful to me and helps me deal with the insanity of the world we live in. I wanted to share this great list of vetted organizations and funds that support the work of folks on the ground in Minnesota, if you have the means to donate. TY!