Link: the bride.

NEW EDEN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ISABELLE RAYMOND

“New Eden: The Life and Work of Isabelle Raymond is an ongoing installation project that presents a lost (fictional) history to be “discovered” by the installation’s audience. Exploring photography’s power to persuade, I invented the character of Isabelle Raymond, a nineteenth-century, cross-dressing female photographer, and her male model, M. Claudet, whom she photographs in poses traditionally reserved for the female nude. I assume her persona both before and behind the camera, creating the seemingly antique faded Victorian photographs attributed to her. Isabelle’s iconoclastic portrayals critique both ancient and Victorian mythologies of the gender and the body. Focusing on the cultural ideals of an earlier era, the images and installation explore how certain preconceptions and assumptions are perpetuated through visual and literary traditions and how those conventions influence our understanding of history, gender and race and self-identity still today.

The viewers “discover” Isabelle’s photographs in two separate contexts?-The Museum and The Back Room. The public space of the Museum holds an exhibition of the photographer’s images in a well-lit gallery, complete antique frames and curatorial signage and interpretive labels that offer an “official” history for the fictional photographer. In contrast to the museum setting, The Back Room—a darkened room lit by only 2 oil lamps—allows the viewer to enter what appears to be a private domestic space inside an abandoned home. Here viewers can touch and interact with the images inside an antique photo album, look through a stereoscope to view a three-dimensional image of a male Venus or rummage through various drawers to find images that upset traditional assumptions about nineteenth-century men and women… The viewers become participants … The Bride Wore Trousers appropriates and subverts the conventions of museum display, western mythology and the history of art with the additional space of The Back Room to create a kind of alternative archive from which to reconsider not only the past but the present and future—to examine the biases, assumptions and stereotypes that still influence us today…

Ultimately the installation seeks to expand the possibilities for understanding our selves and others, and offer alternative.”  –