Surrogate: Performance for 20 (2001)
performance, c-prints, and pencil

Surrogate: Performance for 20 involved twenty performances with twenty collaborators over six months. Collaborators were asked to gather together photographs of themselves with old friends and former partners and we met to discuss their images and to choose photographs that we wanted to work with. The collaborators and I then re-created each of the images, emphasizing gesture, pose, composition, and gaze; the collaborators performed themselves, and I performed the absent person. The project, in its viewable form, consists of twenty photographs that are visually analogous to the source images. In installation the photographs are mounted to the wall, with notes (Lisa & Nenna, Jonathon & Emily, Marcy & Cristian) which refer to the original actors in the photographs pencilled below each.