Artists in Inventory

 

Artist Statement

I still remember the moment…I had just turned 23 and I was in the kitchen chopping carrots for my pot of vegetarian chili.  The smells were heavenly.  I could see my black cat, Puppy, batting at flies through the screen in her window seat.  Aaahh, the end of summer…now trying to be fall…dust motes twirling in privately guided whirlwinds…the clink of ice cubes in my tea. 

…and then a rapping at my door.

I descended the stairs to open it.  And that’s when the wrongness came in.  I was blinded by a tsunami of sunlight, and there! --a silhouette where a person should’ve been.  The silhouette held a piece of mail in his outstretched hand, “this is yours.”  I opened my mouth to answer him, but found I could not speak.  Alphabetical fragments hovered around me, but the threads that connected them to sound had all been cut, and so there I stood: surrounded by untethered letters and miles of thread. I felt my head splitting, and a weird electric crackle as the shrinking and expanding of mysterious knobs of tissue in my brain manufactured a sparkle of halos within glittering halos.  And then the sickening dizziness and everything went into blackness.  

Today, I know that blackness. It is a place where things lose their shape, a place where anything is possible. I used to go there because I had to. Twenty years past, and with the alleviation of debilitating migraines, I now go to there by choice --to become filled and to be safe. Many of my images emerge from this darkness perfectly formed. They burn themselves onto my consciousness in the form of a dream and then melt into a river of ether. I come to, and I draw what I have seen.  There are many drawings in my journal that never get made into photographs.

Meanwhile, here in the material world, there is a conspiracy afoot -a force that wishes to convince me that what I see is real. Light is photography's accomplice in this, for just as photographs still seem like transparent windows onto reality, light is a property that stimulates my sense of sight and turns the world into a seamless tapestry of interwoven truths. Too bad it's not that easy...really, the truth is never settled. It is always partial, fragmented, just beyond my reach, -like a dream where I run and run and run and move nowhere, it is unattainable in this existence.

I believe that there is more truth in the shifting, not-knowingness of the dark than there is in the brightness of the light. My darkroom is a material simulacrum of the dark place. It is the only place where I have ever seen the Light as a material substance, as opposed to experiencing it as quality that allows me to see OTHER material substances. This matters to me a lot. It is the light, I think, that I am really searching for. Nobody ever told me that it was hiding in the darkness.

Artist Biography

Smith Eliot is an award winning photographer living in Portland, Oregon.  She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Sculpture & Photography from SUNY, Buffalo.  Her work is shown internationally, and has been published in Shots Magazine and B&W Magazine among other photographic publications & literary journals.