It was terrific fun putting together my waiting room/office/photo studio. But there was one dilemma in propping the waiting room so realistically that people actually thought it was a remnant of the original clinic--having all those requisite gossip magazines around. I now know more than anyone should about Brad, Angelina and Jen, Lindsay and Sam's perpetual sturm und drang, who’s had what body work where, and the outfits worn by baby fashionista Suri Cruise that cost more than anything I own. Not to mention the hook ups, marriages, breakups, weight losses and gains of seemingly countless celebs who all seem to look alike and star on reality TV. And the ridiculous names of their children: Bronx, Honor, Zuma, Kingston and Sunday for openers.
But as it turns out these magazines aren’t the only things that blurred the boundaries between public and private.
My installation was all about mash ups: a doctor’s office morphs into a photo studio, the real overlaps with the faux, and the border between the communal and the intimate becomes remarkably porous. People live in their skin and doctors and photographers both at home examining people but not usually in quite in the same way. Medical professionals peer at bodies at a distance usually reserved for lovers. In Home/Body Imaging and in my performative role as photo practitioner, I get to look at people’s skin in as intimate a way as a doctor’s. And I too get to hear personal histories and stories (which I protect in a my own HIPAA sort of way). Where else would I have found out that a friend of mine has a scar where his first wife stabbed him with a kitchen knife? Who knew that someone always thought the arches of her feet were particularly beautiful? So from all this I have the unique and glorious opportunity to make beautiful pictures of these special places on the body with which I’m suddenly entrusted,
One of the many great things about HomeBase is that it provides the chance and support for experimentation. Home/Body Imaging would never have come into being otherwise; it is a very new way for me to make work yet it simultaneously wound up yet another surprising mash up. My long ago study of interior design collided with my photographic interest in interiors (and oddly colored ones at that. The Martha Steward cardiac arrest peach-y hued paint of the clinic walls looked as if it were made from melting all the old recalled Crayolas that had inappropriately been called “flesh.” Actually it reminded me a lot of places I’d stayed in Asia). And those two interests made me revisit images I did in my Perdue Series awhile back (those are on my website: www.abbyrobinson.com). Home/Body Imaging (photos of my project are posted on my FaceBook page) certainly made me feel far more at home in my work and that was definitely a HomeBase gift.
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