Medium: Digital Photograph

Size: 16.2x12.5"

Year: 2009

Description: The Kali Series originated on a bad weekend when I lost my wallet, My car broke down coming back from teaching in Baltimore, and I had to pay $ 700 to get my exhaust system repaired. I kept telling myself ”You idiot! How could you lose your wallet? Why didn’t you get the car looked at sooner? Suddenly I thought “Kali loses her wallet” “Kali pays too much for car repair” and I felt a lot better. If Kali did these things she wouldn’t lose her power, so why should I? I made Kali figures out of clay, modeling them somewhat after a sculpture of Kali I got in Benares. I photographed her in scenes with other small objects and dolls, hand-colored the photographs cut out and colored photographs of dolls and glued them into rough wooden boxes in which I had received engineering drawings from India. False and dried plants gave a feeling of wild nature, and small toys and handmade objects filled in the edges. In one old text, Kali is quoted as saying “All women are my parts”. Some people write about Kali as one who unifies opposites—the loving mother and the bloodthirsty warrior. But what Kali means to me is one who is not perfect, who does things that others might call bad, but is still powerful and worthy of respect. These things are not opposites really—they are parts of a normal complete human being. The boxes were rough on the exterior and filled with brightly colored photographs, objects and plants. The titles were painted gold with gothic letters to give them an ecclesiastical character, like stained glass windows representing the lives of saints. Kali is not only unashamed of her mistakes, she presents them proudly to others as models for living. Later, I decided to create dollhouses that had similar elements to the Kali boxes. Sometimes Kali appears two, three or four times in different guises and different rooms. Now my house is overfilled with three-dimensional art and I am returning to my roots as a photographer. I set up Kali and other artifacts on a table in my basement inside an old dresser drawer I used to use for photography in graduate school. I use only window light. Everything suddenly seems so easy again! Why didn’t I think of this before!