Catch Series: The Second Installment
Mayfly 30"x60" c-print
Midge 30"x60" c-print
Popper 30"x60" c-print
Nymph 30"x60" c-print
Bait 30"x60" c-print
As my opening at Artspace on September 22nd gets closer, I thought I would build upon my last post on the Catch Series just to get back in the mood...
In the beginning, I was interested in the parallel between dating and fishing. As Sam and I began shopping for flies (lures) together, I began to ask questions about fly fishing. I noticed that our fly boxes were quite different: mine full of brightly colored critters that resembled tropical fish and exotic sea creatures, Sam's box full of smaller, earth colored insects. I learned that you want to use a fly that resembles whatever it is that a given fish would encounter in their environment and want to eat. This makes sense: if you want to catch a trout, you have to know what a trout likes to eat. A trout's diet will be different from a salmon, a bass or a tarpon. To complicate matters, their eating habits vary seasonally, according to what insects or fish are hatching or maturing.
So appearance is the name of the game in fly fishing as well as dating. If you know what you want to attract, you have to know its appetite. This prompted me to think about the many "phases" my outward appearance underwent in order to blend into my environment and coax the attention of the catch at hand.
Which then led me to think about archetypes of female sexuality: cheerleaders, prom queens, and so on. But I didn't stop with teen drama because we continue to modify our disposition as our own dating appetites shift away from youth, hard bodies and popularity towards a desire for... gulp... marriage, wealth and white picket fences. So I casted different types of women in the hopes that the viewer could imagine the type of guy she wants to attract just by how she looks.
In the beginning, I used vocabulary common to dating and fishing to title each piece such as "line", "hook", etc. As I learned more about different types of flies, a whole new world of words opened themselves up to me. If you want to get more specific, anglers tie an array of different flies: zonkers, wooly buggers, poppers, clausers, streamers, etc. Midges, nymphs and caddis' are types of flies just like the art piece references a type of woman.
Stay tuned for more... BTW, "Bait" is the piece that won the Virginia Museum of Fine Art's Professional Fellowship in 2005.
posted by Mel @ 5:38 PM
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