"Vacation: Cuban Walls" was shot in Cuba in 1999. "Perros: Dogs of Havana" was shot in 2000. The Perros were exhibited at Havana Gallery in Vancouver in 2002 and at Pteros Gallery in Toronto in 2005. Poets Catherine Owen and Joe Rosenblatt have written a series of sonnets inspired by these dogs of Havana. Selections of the poems and images were published as "Caneide" by Italy's Schena Editore Press in 2005. The complete manuscript is being published by Mansfield Press of Toronto in Fall 2008.
Combined, "Vacation" and "Perros" have become "Turista" and create a visual documentation of the psychology and emotional journey of a Candian tourist in Cuba. This tourist is self-reflexive and highly conscious of the power wielded by her camera, and, as such, is very aware of the layers of cultural differences and economic privilege that guide her photographic choices and fill her camera’s frame. Similar to Matei Glass’ “The Other in Palestine,” these images are of Cuba, but they are about the tourist behind the camera and the relationship between the photographer and her subjects rather than a uni-directional gaze at the Cuban ‘other.’ “Turista” is a meeting of Cuba and tourist in the photographic image. I am working towards exhibiting "Turista" in North America and bringing the images back to Havana.
Lethe: a Mock Metaphysics (1999-2005) "Moe, in Lethe: a mock metaphysics, revokes photographic and metaphysical seamlessness, slapping her selves one on top of the other in an orgiastic and traumatic card game. Her “the[ory]atre” is both a Beckettian blasting of the impossibility of justice in this sacrilege of a universe and the bravest of admissions that, to heal from violation, one must expose the irreconcilable in oneself, even to the point of respect." Catherine Owen
The mask is the meaning, in so far as it is absolutely pure (Roland Barthes)
Let them hate so long as they fear (Cicero)
Karen Moe’s interest in photographically documenting exteriority, the unseen and the ignored leads this project into the edges and fissures of Western metaphysics. Lethe: a metaphysics is a ‘mock metaphysics’ where contradictions, absurdities and horrors surface in a system that is strangely recognizable as our own.
Named after the river Lethe that is drunk from in order to instill forgetfulness before one descends into Hell, Lethe addresses constructions of reality and cultural memory based upon what hasn’t been remembered. This project emerged from a feminist desire to articulate some of the silences at the core of patriarchal culture. Lethe is also a response to Moe’s own rapes and abduction, serving as both a protest against systemic violence and as a testament to the un-killable and un-corruptible spirit. Inspired by Christine de Pizan’s Fifteenth Century re-writing of Western mythology based on the overt differences between what Pizan read and what she observed in the world, the artist’s disbelief in the naturalization of a social system that molests, oppresses and kills in order to maintain its hegemony resulted in a desire to delve into her own social psyche and see what silences she could voice.
In the tradition of Carolee Schneeman’s ‘double knowledge’ where women living in patriarchy “are simultaneously complicit and resistant” (Scheeman Imagining her Erotic 121), Lethe sculpts archetypal shapes from this contradictory and, hence, controversial context. Stretching idealized gender representations until they sprawl into the realm of the grotesque, Moe peals back the binaric masks and inscribed surfaces of masculinity and femininity to reveal an enfleshed psychic reality where humour meets horror. Unheilmlich, the unfamiliar/familiar is made strange with the intention that the spectator will become aware of the constructed nature and, therefore, transformability of any given representation of the ‘real.’ Lethe enacts a space of courageous recollection where the artist’s fraught enculturated selves can scream from their Pandora’s Box to breathe, laugh, and weep.
Images from "Lethe: a Mock Metaphysics" were featured in Subterrain Magazine #46 in 2007 along with a critical essay by Catherine Owen. www.subterrain.ca. If you are a feminist writer and/or scholar, contact me as I am always interested in critical responses to this controversial work!
Music
detritus: East Vancouver Alleyways (with Wind Photographs) 2004
itinerant
his eyes do not contain the world they are dark as the heart & lungs
he flirts with himself, then grimaces, as shiftless as the elements
hastily, he paces the alleyways, hair black with an animal's plummage
his arms never stop keeping timelessness, but like a bee poised on granite
he is lost in the silence of pollen.
Catherine Owen
The "detritus: East Vancouver Alleyways" photographs are a collaboration with poet Catherine Owen's poems on mental illness and drug addiction. The book was published by Anvil Press in fall 2006. www.anvilpress.com
Karen Moe Photography's Details
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In a Relationship
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Scorpio
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About me: Guardian of the gates of hell, brightest star in the night sky, the dog is the saucy, swaggering, world-weary trickster whose indomitable spirit has been mythologized for millennia. In Dog, poets Catherine Owen and Joe Rosenblatt have written a volume of solo and conjoined sonnets about dogs of the cosmos, the underworld, and the psyche. Orbiting around the striking canine images of photographer Karen Moe's Perros: Dogs of Central Havana, Owen and Rosenblatt wisely and wittily follow the scent of mankind's oldest friend, sniffing out traces of the dog in all of us. www.mansfieldpress.net
Artist Statement
Karen Moe
I am a political artist. In all of my work, I am interested in edges, liminal spaces, and subject matter that exist outside of and confound dominant modes of seeing. My work is inspired by feminism as a pursuit of justice and in participating in the politics of representation by contributing alternative photographic ‘evidences.’ I prioritize the emotions and the soul but, at the same time, use the self-reflexivity of Post Structuralism to promote a progressive and life affirming politic. Once emotions have been activated, once the soul has been engaged, the work then interacts critically and conceptually with its cultural context. This movement is called “Emotive Conceptualism.”
In my current projects, I am focusing on the wilderness, and the contemporary urgency of symbolically reconnecting with its mysticism, vulnerability and power that have been ontologically barred from Western Civilization. “Sea Surfaces” is the first project where I am overtly creating beauty that counters the oppression and exploitation that dominates, silences, and destroys. Countering Post-modernism’s intellectualized fragmentation and its view of nature as fully conditioned and contained by culture[1], I am interested in surfacing and celebrating some of the resilient truths of the wilderness that need to be honoured and respected on their own terms outside of human control and containment. In vitalizing Roland Barthes’ influential notion of the photographic ‘that has been’ which terminates fatalistically as ‘flat death,’[2] I am working towards using the medium to remember what has been forgotten in order to remind us of what is still here.
[1] Campany, David. Art and Photography. London: Phaidon Press, 2003.
[2] Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
