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'Between Shapes Or Congruents' from 'Between Or Before'

Savvy viewers know to mistrust their own eyes when looking at photography, in large part, because photographers' subversive uses of the medium have trained them to be skeptical. But Airyka Rockefeller's diverse photographic series go beyond highlighting aesthetic or conceptual manipulation. Her images raise unsettling existential questions about the broader nature of being present in one's environment, whether or not a camera is sharing the space.

Like Francesca Woodman, Rockefeller often photographs herself in poses and guises where her face is obscured but her presence makes the images both intensely personal and ironically reflective of young women's shared experiences and concerns.

Rockefeller's 'Disappear' series, which she photographed as an undergraduate student at Sarah Lawrence College, have the eerie feel of nineteenth-century spirit photography, in which Rockefeller's graceful body appears blurred and obscured, as if she were only tentatively a part of her surroundings and might be more comfortable on another terrestrial plane. These dreamy, slightly gothic images resonate with the same poetic poignancy as Woodman's images and address many of the same issues that Abrigail
 Solomon-Godeau highlighted in her comparison between Woodman and the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's monumental pre-feminist short-story 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' Carrying on the tradition of Gilman and Woodman, in her self-portraits Rockefeller's accomplishes with Solomon-Godeau describes as, "presenting herself as a living sacrifice to the domus."



In later series that Rockefeller developed in overseas artist-in-residencies and through her academic studies, she further explored the complex connections between individuals and the things closest to their bodies - clothes or objects in their immediate environment.

The twenty-eight-year-old artist grew up on an island in the Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle. She moved to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence college to study art and phenomenological anthropology. Airyka relocated to India to substantiate her growing interest in studies of the body in South East Asia through independent work as a guest of Friends World College. She remained in India for a year, traveling from the far South to far North, living first with a Hindu family in Bangalore, then a Christian family in Cochin, followed by a Muslim family in Jaipur, a Sikh family in Chandigarh, and lastly, a group of young Dalit - Untouchable - girls, as a resident artist at The Barli Institute for Rural Women, in the city of Indore.

Returning to the Pacific Northwest in 2001, she began to show both short films and photographic work in Seattle before relocating to San Francisco to attend the California College of the Arts for graduate studies in photography. Concurrent with her MFA, Airyka spent two summers living in Vilnius, Lithuania working on "The Borderland Boys", a series of photographs around communal landscapes of leisure around offshoots of the Neres River. The following year she spent the autumn in the Czech Republic, through the artist residency "Milkwood International." She currently works and resides in San Francisco and New York.

Airyka Rockefeller will contribute to "And, who are you?
Artists from Saatchi Online," an exhibition of artists from Saatchi
 Online which opens on 18 December at the Sara Tecchia Roma New
York gallery. In the "MySpace for artists" sensibility of the Saatchi Online site, the site reconnected me to Airyka, who had attended Sarah Lawrence College during my years but who I remembered only as an elegant, striking girl whose name I thought was either 'Erica' or 'Eleanor.' While throlling 
through the Saatchi site for artists in the New York-area whose work reflected the core concerns of the exhibition, I came across Airyka's profile, which oddly had no self-portraits. After I contacted her about the show, we started corresponding and finally made the connection. The following exchange, which took place in a series of emails, is a long-overdue conversation with this thoughtful and vastly talented artist, as she establishes a place within the art world for her examination of our places within the many worlds of our own.

'Untitled' from 'Nine Skins'

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: In your "Nine Skins" series, you present discarded garments as skins we shed. Do you feel nudity or the state of being fully dressed is a more honest expression of our individuality and identity?

AIRYKA ROCKEFELLER: While I most definitely love being fully naked, I think being fully dressed is a more intriguing state of being. Regarding the issues of honesty and identity, it's tricky. I guess I'd ask you: is a chameleon dishonest simply because it changes color or shape? Disguises sometimes lie, but not all the time!

AFH: Perhaps 'honesty' was a misleading word to use in this context. Do you think our naked or clothed bodies reveal more about who we are as individuals?

AR: I think the nude body references something, which we all operate from, as a communal frame. The body is primal and original, thus it unifies us beyond individual expression. In contrast, I think clothing allows us to realize our chameleon-like potential. We select the color of our secondary skins and therefore, these second skins function as our guises. Clothes are our armor and our charmer. And because each of us has a different sense of what protects and what charms, I feel the state of being fully dressed is much more expressive of our individuality than the state of nudity.

AFH: How do you feel about women who explicitly use fashion as a form of performance art or theatrical self-expression?

AR: I think that explicit fashion seems to signal "keep-away," as much as it signals "come-closer." Perhaps that's why it is a realm of self-expression that is both intellectually slighted and cherished by the elite. There is an inherently charged struggle involved in loving it. There's a dualistic aspect that is infuriatingly yet compellingly indulgent. It is sensual and earthly - which, ironically, brings us right back to the bared body again!

AFH: Well it is quite interesting that in 'Nine Skins,' you use discarded clothes to make a statement about nudity. In many ways, the garments themselves become intimate and erotically charged objects, even though their original purpose was, ironically, to clothe the naked body. In your context, the clothes signal nudity.

AR: I was drawn to work with garments for 'Nine Skins' mostly out of a fascination with clothing as a medium for daily transformations, including the transformation from clothed to unclothed. At the time I made 'Nine Skins,' I was in a graduate class taught by Ranu Mukherjee, who I adore. In Mukherjee's class, we were researching concepts of avatars, doubles, shape-shifters, and theories of doppelgangers. We were discussing certain literary and psychological tropes, illustrating ways one can suddenly run into oneself in dreams, topics right up my alley. The class inspired me to start thinking about ordinary and overlooked cases in which we shed and regenerate our parts. I began to examine the transformation capabilities and guises of plant-life. Animals' environmental camouflage and mimicry of other of animals were also on my mind. One night in my bedroom I was thinking about snakes shedding their skins as I proceeded to peel out of my shirt, stretching my body slowly as I bent toward the ground, letting my shirt unfurl, while keeping my hands firmly rooted on the floor. In that pose, my body was only a u-shaped line shedding an outer-layer like a snake, without assistance from limbs. When I arose, the garments I had enlivened just moments before seemed to stare back at me from the floor. Without touching my body, they seemed to have taken on a body of their own. The anthropomorphizing form looked at me with an expression that softened, as the bit of air inside it escaped. From the shadows of two bunched sleeve-holes, it gazed at me with a quite peculiar expression.

AFH: Are you saying that the object had taken on an independent life of its own once you were no longer enlivening it, or that the object was something that had once been animate and was now a dead thing?

AR: For a fleeting time, I stood there and sensed this object. It had it's own temperature, scent, character and weight. It was as if I was sensing a living body. I wanted to make a sculptural piece that expressed this feeling to someone encountering the object, without having to understand my conceptual framework.

AFH: Since the social subtext implicit in fashion functions on a most subliminal level, I imagine this product could be understood without exposing the theoretical underpinnings.

AR: In the end, I can't say whether it was worked or not. I did attempt to evoke a sense of intimacy and yet uncanny unfamiliarity with the garments by placing them along a window's seat right along the public street. The glass pane between was another echo of a skin. It was important as an edge and border. I am interested in the duality of borders as simultaneously protective and also restricting.

AFH: Yes, but our actual skin often has a much more significant impact on our social relationships than the clothes we wear.

AR: Indeed. Skin, identity, and clothing are incredibly significant, since all function as protective device, as well as aesthetic symbols or totems. They are visual symbols representing groupings. These are different ways in which the creature is bound with others of its kind. Additionally, we have a cyclical and thus, a lineage-based, relationship to them. In every way, skin functions as a method of knowing time and of having our history made visible to others. We are not simply inside or outside of our skins, but rather between ongoing layers, which are always re or de-generating.

AFH: In which case, why title the project "Nine Skins" and put a numerical perimeter around a continuing process?

AR: I decided to cast the work in a grouping of nine because the name functions as a play on the phrase "nine lives" like the cat's nine chances at truth. I love how the phrase is used casually, almost comically, yet derives from a mythical or spiritual, karma-based take on chronology. "Nine lives" references a realm of legends and fate, which tie into these poetic delineations more than the standard annual time-code. Nine lives may best be delineated by lovers or geographical locations, colors or habits, rather than charted via years or phases of time at all. Like this, scavenging for linked relationships in the found world certainly has no singular reward or end point but rather the ongoing pleasure of relating what at first glance seems only disparate. By using the title "Nine Skins", I'd like to evoke these links, and reconnect larger spiritual considerations to more mundane representation of the body than are often realized in relationship between the body and its accoutrements.

'Untitled (View)' from 'The Borderland Boys'

AFH: Were the clothes you presented at the Million Fishes Gallery yours?



AR: The clothes were mine. If they hadn't been, I would feel like a fake!



AFH: Why? From what you're saying, you were presenting the garments as representative of something universal. It seems to me that confining the piece to clothes that you'd worn adds a possibly distracting self-referential component to the project. 



AR: Well, I cheated a bit a few weeks before the show, but for aesthetic instead of conceptual reasons. 



AFH: What happened? 



AR: I realized that because I was showing the garments as sculpture, and therefore presenting them in actual space, rather than in photographed form, certain fabrics held up better than others. The most personality-imbued and time-sustainable shapes were made out of cotton. Cotton has the ability to fold, catch air, and self-support, rather than instantly deflate, as silk or a sweater material would. So, after realizing this problem, I ravaged thrift stores for the last few pieces I needed to make a series of nine. But after I bought the new items, I still wore them for a few weeks to impregnate them with my scent and with my personal history, even if it was brief. Then I installed them, via an oddly intimate performance in which I wore all nine of the shirts and writhed out of them, one by one, along a narrow windowsill in the gallery storefront, located in the middle of San Francisco's residential district. 


AFH: How do you conceive your books projects differently from the work you display in an exhibition context?

AR: In terms of books, it is mostly a solitary process, but the advice and input from friends and mentors is so important. It is always the person right next to you who has a vastly different take on what you see from virtually the same angle. It is that slim angle in which everything lies! I may start a project feeling alone, but it never ends without many other influences entering and affecting it. Sometimes, as an exercise, I'll remap a book-in-progress, editing the book in reverse. Or, I'll work from an content-based pivotal point, outwards in both directions simultaneously, giving it a conceptual spine in real space. It functions like origami or pattern-making. I like finding echoes. I like working with diptychs, perhaps this explains so much of my interest in book lay-out. In conclusion, I'll finally fold these pairings into a book form before I look at it again. I touch it a lot too. I want to know the pages. It's a bit of everything! The whole process can take days or stretch into many indecisive months. And I often still want to change it, even after it is printed.

AFH: How is this different from an on-site exhibition?

AR: For me, conceiving an exhibition is a more focused, editorially selective endeavor, largely affected by the physical site of the space the work will be encountered within, and the taste of a curator, etc. I prefer to be familiar with the site before I decide what scale to print my images; knowing how the images will be faced by viewers, how close they will be to the gaps of the doorways, and how they will be lit... I also need to understand the space before I can appreciate how the images will interrelate. Insight from curators and others is also invaluable to this process.

AFH: Why do you return repeatedly to producing self-portraits?

AR: This is a hard question. I've always done self-portraits. Over the years, I have strongly felt I had to do them for growth and reflection and a sense of cohesion.

AFH: What do you mean when you say "always"?

AR: I mean over fifteen years. Self-portraits have become a chronology that I feel I willfully, but rather privately, continue.

AFH: How are they private when they are such a strong component of your oeuvre?

AR: Well, I don't often show them. I am far more interested in exhibiting my other photographic projects, projects which also come from my life, and yet are not explicitly autobiographical.

AFH: Why would you be apprehensive about exhibiting work that is overtly autobiographical?

AR: I think it's a bit arrogant to present a visual memoir at my age. A project like that conjures a grand approach to life, but mine might not end up deserving that approach at all!

AFH: That's a very admirable perspective but a vast number of the most influential, thoughtful and inspiring artists in contemporary art and art history used autobiography as a means of expressing larger concerns and more universal concepts.

AR: You are right! And I do love many artists who have used self portraiture in quietly performative, and personal ways, which ultimately are very political, charged works: Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Elena Brotherus, Frida Kahlo, among others. I must say, of course, that I intend my life to deserve a grand approach, in the end! But first I feel I must earn, over various periods and practices, the right to use a voice that blends fiction and autobiography, poetics and cultural studies, because it is such a voice of hybridity. Likewise, I also feel I need to live in many places and amidst many cultures, if I am going to be able to discuss place, or culture, or life wisely.

AFH: Without functioning as an illustration of your life, how do your self-portraits approach these issues?

AR: I'm not sure, perhaps they hardly do. I know I have always made my self-portraits in very solitary spaces. I think of the camera as a kind of witness in these circumstances, yet it has a very different volume than a written diary, where the gazes of diverse strangers can project their own story into a single image.

AFH: The notion of 'the gaze' has a troubling history in recent Western art practice.

'The Rest Of The River' from 'The Borderland Boys'

AR: I am conflicted about the gaze as well! I believe my sense of conflict is shared and there are different ways of investigating it. I want alignment and kinship with the world around me, but often I am disoriented and I feel misaligned with my immediate environment. I tend to make self-portraits only when I feel a connection to an actual place, even if it's only a transitory, in-between space. My series 'Between Or Before' is an explicit expression of this process of moving between places, finding a place I imagine I might blend into. Of course, serendipitous alignment with life only occurs when one stops seeking it! Or that is one approach, one style. My ongoing experiment of gazing the self gazing back and the self, the one that I imagine will make more sense in time, involves wrestling with finding where I belong through the making of pictures.

AFH: Do you mean where you belong as an artist, or are you referring to a more existential set of concerns?

AR: When I read the surrealist writer Roger Caillois's "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia" a few years ago, as a graduate student in San Francisco, I was utterly struck by his theory of schizophrenic spatiality. In Caillois's text, a subject, as a body, is literally subsumed by the space he or she occupies. They experience a loss of bodily boundary. They are unable to distinguish between outside and inside, or between the flesh and the world. Often this feeling occurs in the darkness of night, when without illumination, or discerning sight, the person looses their sense of personal placement.

AFH: Does Caillois's theories relate to the thinking that inspired "Nine Skins?"

AR: Caillois describes absolutely mind-bogglingly diverse examples from the animal kingdom in which distinctions between an organism and its surroundings are broken down due to "mimicry." Animals morph. They change flesh to hide to disguise themselves and temporarily disappear into their surroundings. This is part of what Caillois describes as "a general spectacle of mimicry," in which the three realms of nature merge into one another, and are pantheistic conflating the animate and inanimate. As Gustave Flaubert wrote in 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony', "Plants are now no longer distinguished from animals, insects identical with rose petals adorn a bush...and then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts..."

AFH: It seems surrealism, not photography, would be the most effective way of expressing these theories.

AR: I associate these ideas with Hieronymus Bosch's infamous "Garden Of Earthly Delights," which is maybe my single favorite piece of art. With its overpowering foreboding and sensual conflation of animals, humans and plants, Bosch's "Garden Of Earthly Delights" represents an image of combined, merged entity that alters the inanimate world irrevocably. With that said, this is not surreal topic-matter me at all but rather located, very grounded.

AFH: Do you feel photography is a medium that grounds these concepts for you?

AR: Photography's ability to lock life into a fixed time and singular space is thrilling, but also maddening to me. In my self-portraits series "Disappear" (1997-2001), I achieved the visual effects of transparency by never ceasing to move when I was in front of the camera. I left the shutter open over many moments and did not count the passing time. I never came face to face with the camera's gaze. I slipped like air or vapor out from under the solidity of the body, using the trickery of film and the light at hand to commune with the more mysterious aspects of space, in some vestigial, visual manifestation.

'The Hole' from 'Self-Portraits To Disappear'

'Duel' from 'Self-Portraits To Disappear'

AFH: Was Spirit Photography an influence in these images?

AR: I have since seen and adored old Spirit Photographs, but at the time in 1999 I was unfamiliar with any. Indeed, in "Self-portraits To Disappear" there was an attempt to use light to hint at the haunting of specific terrains by figurative apparitions. In that series the figure's navigations were not in the studio but in contemporary environments, civilized forests and suburban fields, as well as structural spaces of domestic windows and doors, which opened out onto those landscapes, whose edges bordered wild space. In those works the figure was always on the wind, either conjured by the surrounding place, or else conjuring in order to part with those places just as suddenly.

AFH: How have these notions of the self in the space evolved in your more recent work?

AR: In my recent and on-going self-portraits series "Between Or Before," I am trying to come down from the flying, rapid, ephemeral movements and locate the ground. I want to find gravity. In these images, I am sitting with myself in quiet, solitary moments that contain no action and no seeking. I wonder how a lack of gestural action draw attention to attentiveness itself, to the gaze, and to the supposed place on the other side of the gaze, the observed space.

AFH: How do you do this without creating a boring image, or an image that looks like the demonstration of boredom instead of inactivity?

AR: I think that attentiveness is rather unlike boredom. Boredom is more standoffish, a kind of stance, a refusal to look and to find something to be susceptible to. For these works, when I look at the camera, I am not trying to look past it, at a forecasted audience, but back at myself, over a period of time. Through this process of looped gazing, I hope that the resulting images express anticipation, both restlessness and grounded-ness. What joins these three is a "downtime" that we generally do not share with others but experience alone. It is a liminal state that we rarely analyze or investigate.

AFH: Are these the moments we think of as "zoning out?"

AR: These are moments that occur when you are waiting for something but you don't know what. It's hard to describe. I hate the word 'downtime' but there is not really one word for what I am trying to express. Perhaps, it is the opposite of 'decisive.' Or perhaps an indecisive moment is just a state 'between or before' any identifiable event or happening.

AFH: It seems as if the title articulates your meaning perfectly.

AR: "Between or Before" is a working title. I have also considered "Here and Elsewhere" since another attribute that conceptually links the pictures, is that they are all taken in places which have served as temporary homes for me. Or else, they are places that I have inhabited in transition as I have moved between homes. Whether they are ships, walking-paths or trains, they are spaces I occupied en route to elsewhere.

'Eavesdropping'