Priestess
In photographs I am the Priestess, performing camp rituals and offerings in surreal American landscapes, often deserts and coastlines. Joined by friends and performers who embody Priestess-ness, we explore her imagined lineage as an archetype which any femme person, of any gender, can inhabit.
Part Buster Keaton and part Barbarella, the Priestess is a mystic vagabond. She consecrates landscapes with gestural incantations. Her rites are conversations with the primordial consciousness of nature. Her precarious confidence is stylistically drawn from women of 1970’s horror films, as well as hermetic lineages of nuns, monks, witches, and mystic seers who live far away from society at large. The Priestess lives on the edges of civilization, working the transcendence of the margins. She abstracts trauma into the absurd; she makes ceremonial meaning from assemblages of everyday cultural objects. She conjures liminal states of knowing and unknowing through liturgical comedy.
In the winter sun of the desert, tropical fruits or a wayward shopping bag become comical and fraught emblems of the present, reconciling an imagined ancient matrilineal past with a mundane and isolated contemporary culture. Priestess is performed by Sophie Traub, Jessica Galluci, Sarah Moran, Ana Rifa, LA Santiago, and Mollie McKinley.