Intimacies and Infidelities

My mother was devastated by my father’s infidelity during the same time period that I was passionately involved with a married man. The archetypes of the ‘scorned wife and the other woman’ had always seemed to me to be opposites...rivals...enemies. However, thirty years later, as I examine my mother’s journal entries and my own from that time, I realize that our experiences were remarkably similar. To the ‘other woman’, the wife is the other woman. This realization led me to explore a visual language to articulate the dualities that inhabit our stories of secrets, betrayals, disappointment and hope. Intimacies and Infidelities is a new project that continues my ongoing theme: Women and Pretending. I have always been fascinated by multiple interpretations, double exposures, and the ambiguities that arise depending on which character is telling the story. My process begins with a collection of elements...images...writing. As I move the elements around, a visual narrative begins to take shape, signaling a new understanding of parallel stories. My use of collage indicates a story told in two voices, representing identities that have been torn apart, stripped, reflected upon, and ultimately reconstructed.