Samhain New (Winter Solstice) Moon
Lunch today with Lonnie Helgeson, an old friend. We’d gone to the Walker together for lunch many times prior to our mutual engagement in child rearing, got off track. Nice to get started again.
We saw the Cindy Sherman show. Lonnie’s a big fan. I am, too, but I didn’t know as much as Lonnie. It’s interesting to consider a artistic career built on substantial modification to one’s self, then the recording of it through photography. It’s as if she has become her own doll, dressed in many costumes and posed in interesting places.
Her work is evocative of stories happening just off camera. Her early black and white work–like many photographers working today her career spans the film to digital change–is vulnerable, has a yearning. She’s fascinated with horror films and it shows in her work.
Lonnie alluded to one way of seeing her entire corpus, as a Jungian set of inner selves, archetypes carried deep within her, many within all of us.
There is, too, a playful side to her work, but more often she veers toward the exploratory, the serious, the strange. In this last case her clown series look like they might have been cast in Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
