March 2, 2015
READ IT HERE. Out today on the phenomenal Guernica magazine- my autobiographical essay and photography series FIELDWORK about my years in the femicide regions of the Southwest and US-Mexico border and Tohono O’Odham Nation, and my time as a fieldworker setting up safe houses for sex trafficked women and children.
All the photographs as well as selections from the essay are currently on exhibit in Wave and Particle at Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho (Feb 14-March 25, 2015).
FIELDWORK is an autobiographical project about my years in the femicide regions of the Southwest and US-Mexico border and Tohono O’Odham Reservation, and my time as a fieldworker setting up safe houses for sex trafficked women and children.
For this project, I returned to sites where I used to work, and created a Vulture Vigilante alter ego. Wrapped in one of the mylar FEMA emergency blankets distributed in the safe houses and used by fieldworkers to protect the bodies of dumped women, the Vulture Vigilante both guards the site, exhumes the site, and harvests out the beliefs and behaviors of a human society in which the murders of women and girls are a normalized part of daily life.
Her role is shamanic, for she walks between the world of the visible living and the invisible dead…yet she also walks between the versions of reality in which female lives are worthless and our violent deaths unremarkable, and a new future in which our bodies and psyches have intrinsic value. As the Vulture locates these bodies, she reveals that the bodies themselves are also hybrids – the women are being transformed from victims into vigilantes. She stands on their graves, invoking them to rise from the dead and seek retribution, justice, and social change.