The Bullfight and Other Family Album Cutouts (2005-6)
My aunt gave me a box of negatives belonging to my grandparents. Among them, were images of a bullfight and of people I didn't recognise. I printed the images and continued to be frustrated by their surface hermeticism. Nobody in the family knew anything about them. Because the photos were of a bullfight and a group of attendees, I began to see the images as bulls and myself as a bullfighter. Using my x-axto knife as sword, I worked my way through the images and after many, many hours with them, understood that I had slowly pierced through their alienness and drawn them into the narrative and context of my body of work.
Following this work, I continued to play with my knife (and sometimes adhesive tape) and images from the box my aunt had given me, carving images into them, splicing and reassembling them, or incising patterns into them. I will include some of them in this gallery.