Amy Jorgensen’s photographs in the series, Residual Evidence: The Body Archive, veer away from our usual expectations of the medium resembling painterly abstractions, with fields of overlapping color, sensual drips and areas of blinding luminosity. We can sense the tension within a microscopic remnant, a smear on a laboratory slide, as it is enlarged and captured on a glossy surface. It is a revelation, as these impressions of her body become an oddly forensic and disjointed self-portrait where the instantaneous opening and closing of the camera’s shutter has been replaced by a performance turned into visual testimony.
-Alessandra Moctezuma, Curator, Oceanside Museum of Art, CA 2006
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For Jorgensen, the photograph is inevitably a constructed work of fiction, and her role in making it -- whether she assembles props and scenery or limits herself to choosing the time and place --makes her essentially its author. Both Calle and Jorgensen actively reject the academic distinction between fiction and non-fiction, along with the notion of an ethical responsibility to be factually accurate. Each willfully contours the behavior that eventually produces the image she presents, and each finds frequent opportunities to place herself within that image. Through rigorous, self-imposed rules at one moment and manipulation of our curiosity the next, they cultivate and thus control the gaze directed at them. It is only from this distance, removed beyond technique, that we can appreciate the fundamental unity of purpose they share with Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Eleanor Antin, and uncounted less-celebrated artists. They don't just direct our looking, or tell us how to think about what we see. Nor are they content to make a show of acknowledging the ethical dilemmas raised by the decision to exploit the other's real life explicitly for essentially fictional purposes.
-Geoff Wichert, Shooting Modern: Amy Jorgensen’s life in photographs, 15 Bytes, December 2006
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