ARTIST STATEMENT
“Original Face” is a long-term photography project documenting the female members of my family and placing them in collaged environments which speak to the sublime, the doors of life and death opening and closing, and the perspective of the hidden v the seen. When the male gaze is removed, what is left? Is this the female gaze, the gaze of the self-portrait? Who is the subject and who is the object. What does it mean to have a self, a no self, an existential void within an embodied subject. This project was made in collaboration with my mother, the poet Miriam Sagan. We work together as “Maternal Mitochondria,” handing the camera back and forth, writing back and forth. Therefore the patriarchal hierarchy of artistic endeavor is broken, and the matrilineal line is strengthened. This is how we see ourselves and each other. This is how we see.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
The team of Maternal Mitochondria is an unusual creative collaboration: a mother/daughter duo. Miriam Sagan is a writer and Isabel Winson-Sagan is an interdisciplinary artist. Since 2014 they have been working together in venues ranging from the Herekeke studio on Lama Mountain north of Taos, New Mexico to SIM house in Reykjavik, Iceland. They combine text and the graphic arts in all they do, from photography to installation to video art. The collaboration itself is unique, as is their practice of often combining traditional Japanese suminagashi with contemporary American poetry.
© Isabel Winson-Sagan