FREMAUX-VALDEZ COLLABORATIVE STATEMENT
Bodies are secrets, or they are keepers of secrets, because they operate largely outside the reaches of consciousness and vision. Medicine and religion promise to decipher the body secret, each offering an account of what this body is, how it works, and how to care for it. We examine embodiment through the lenses of medicine, religious mythology, and our love for each other, mis/applying the ideas, instruments, and/or experience of each in the portrayal of our own bodies.
We “perform” surgical procedures, purifying rites, intimate acts of worship, and feats of miraculous healing on ourselves and each other, often with the use of medical and ceremonial tools, figures, and vestments constructed from items in our house. We photograph these exchanges and fabricate our reference imagery through digital collage, which enables us to cut and transplant photographic tissue in the production of new bodies and environments.
We draw together on paper, building the bones of each piece with charcoal, the mass with gouache, and the skin with chalk pastel. These materials never cure, never calcify; they live in total exposure and proclaim their own vulnerability on sight. We organize them into pictures so big that they resist being seen all at once. Supporting and questioning each other through the obliteration and retrieval of our bodies through drawing, rotating in and out of each piece fluidly, we can rarely tell where one of us ends and the other begins. Through the making of the drawing, we reveal to each other what we cannot see of ourselves, and serve as the stewards of one another’s secrets.
