Claire A. Warden

Mimesis is an ongoing series that engages identity, representation, and language through abstraction and experimental image-making. The creation of this work comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar or unkown is pervasive in American culture. When looking at much of my work, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” – a question directed to me countless times as a person of color with a diverse ethnocultural heritage, and one I increasingly tend to resist. That resistance carries through the work as resistance to definition and, instead, emphasizes opacity and illegibility. Through this work, I subvert the historical problematics of representation and agency in photography, particularly in addressing experiences had by people of color.

For this reason, I believe it is important to know that the Mimesis series is photographic—cameraless photographs—and that I developed a cameraless process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter—thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.