Pinky/MM Bass
Bio
Pinky/MM Bass received her M.F.A. in photography from Georgia State University in 1988 at age 52. She has received grants from the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alabama State Arts Council. Bass' work is represented in numerous collections and museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, and the High Museum in Atlanta. Her photographs have been published in Aperture, The Polaroid Book, the Book of Alternative Photographic Processes and the Pinhole Journal. She was a featured artist in Coat of Many Colors, an Alabama Public Television presentation. Bass has been featured in more than 40 solo exhibitions, and her work has been shown throughout the United States as well as in Italy, Macedonia, Mexico, Canada, and Germany.
Artist Statement - CONTEMPLATING MY INTERNAL ORGANS
My work in photography has always aimed at revealing edges of the mystery of life, aging and death and the human form. The use of pinhole photography and Polaroid technology has created unusual perspectives and a glorious array of mistakes well suited to my particular investigation of the fragility of being. Often surreal, the images that I prefer seem to exist on the edge of the dream world. My quest is not for answers but for new visual conundrums. I particularly like playing with the idea of positive and negative in imagery. In this particular series I was drawn to the idea of making the internal external.
I have worked primarily with the human figure and nature in black and white. During the time that my sister was struggling with cancer I became obsessed with what was happening inside her body and started stitching internal organs on photographs with embroidery thread, partly because I had no energy for the darkroom and partly because it was somehow therapeutic. Light, coming through the holes in the stitched pieces captured my attention since much of my work has been done with pinhole cameras. I began to explore ways in which the light actually could shine through the holes of the photograph, resulting in the presentation format of this series.
PENTAGRAM OF LOSS - Pinky/MM Bass and Reneé Cheveallier
I have had a recurring image about the five people (my son, my only sister, both my parents and Kitty Couch, artist/collaborator) who died over a period of five years. The image was of them forming a pentagram or star with their bodies while I continued to crochet a kind of umbilical chord. Our bodies are made of clay. This piece is about the fragility of the human body, the space of loss and our inner-connectedness. We are left with only traces.
I began collaborating with the dancer and performance artist, Reneé Cheveallier, in 2005 when our mutual friend, Donna Service, unexpectedly died just weeks before she and I were scheduled to do a performance piece in New Orleans, LA. Reneé agreed to work with me in her place and in fact the whole exhibition was renamed For Donna. Since that time Reneé and I have continued to work together on performance pieces by "long distance" as I live in Fairhope, AL and she in Shreveport, LA. Although the basis for this piece came from my initial recurring imagery, the development and form of the performance and resulting installation were created collaboratively as we explored the implications of the ideas and movements that would best express those thoughts.
