Monday, April 19, 2010

At the Hour of Our Death

Death, like birth, is part of a process. However, the processes of death–the events leading up to the end of life, the moment of one's last breath, and the aftermath of death-- are often shielded from view. Today in Western society most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one’s body for its final resting place. Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed, and the scene where a death occurs is cleaned and normalized. As Phillipe Aries writes, “Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity”. The modern means of dealing with death promises to shield mourners from the most graphic aspects of death, yet the emotional and psychological impact of such loss lingers long after any physical evidence of this process has been erased.

Suicide with Gun, Female, 60 years old

Seizure, Male, 25 years old

Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old

At the age of seventeen I lost a friend to suicide. While visiting his home the day after the tragic news I witnessed a clean up crew steam cleaning the carpet in his bedroom. All physical traces of the past 24 hours had vanished.

Illness, Female, 60 years old

Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old

Heart attack, Male, 50 years old (I)

At the Hour of Our Death takes as its starting point Aries's observation that “death's invisibility enhances its terror”. These large-scale color photographs capture and fully illuminate swatches of bedding, carpet and upholstery marked with the signs of the passing of human life. The fabrics which are first removed by a trauma scene clean up crew, are relocated to a warehouse before being incinerated. It is in the warehouse that I photograph these fragments stained with bodily fluids. I tack each swatch to the wall and use the crew’s floodlights to illuminate the scene. The images are my attempt to slow the moments before and after death to a single frame, to allow what is generally invisible to become visible, and to engage with a process from which we have become disconnected.

Heart attack, Male, 50 years old (II)

Heart attack, Male, 50 years old (III)

Overdose, Female, 45 years old

Friday, April 9, 2010

Review in the Houston Chronicle


Artist presents an unsanitized, yet beautiful, vision of death
By DOUGLAS BRITT Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Anyone who saw photographer Sarah Sudhoff's Repository last year at Art League Houston — work that grew out of her 2004 surgery for cervical cancer — already knows she turns an unwavering gaze on the body in medical contexts. Tissue samples, blood-soaked gauze, medical instruments, the artist herself — all were served up for the examination of anyone who dared to look.

In her second Houston solo show, At the Hour of Our Death at De Santos Gallery, Sudhoff again draws inspiration from personal experience. At 17, she lost a friend to suicide and watched a crew steam-clean his bedroom carpet, removing the signs of what had transpired just hours before. For her new series of color photos — all works date from 2010 — she's trained her lens on what trauma-scene cleanup crews whisk away from the scenes where death occurs.

It sounds morbid. But Sudhoff's preoccupation isn't so much with death's gruesomeness as our conflicted relationship with what is, after all, a process we all go through.

“Today, in Western society, most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one's body for its final resting place,” Sudhoff writes in one of the clearest artist statements I've read in recent memory. “Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed, and the scene where a death occurs is cleaned and normalized. … The modern means of dealing with death promises to shield mourners from the most graphic aspects of death, yet the emotional and psychological impact of such loss lingers long after any physical evidence of this process has been erased.”

Sudhoff photographs trauma-scene bedding, carpet and upholstery swatches — all stained with body fluids from a recent death — in a warehouse where they are temporarily held before incineration. She tacks each swatch to the wall, where it is illuminated by the crew's floodlights, and tries “to slow the moments before and after death to a single frame,” she writes.

She titles each 40-by-30-inch print with the cause of death followed by the gender and age of the victim. Because the color is gorgeously saturated and the compositions are reminiscent of post-World War II abstract painting, you're immediately drawn to their formal beauty, only to be stopped in your tracks by the truth. You might think you've seen the rich blues and stained composition in a Helen Frankenthaler painting, but Frankenthaler never painted Heart Attack, Male, 50 years old (II). No, that's not a study after a canvas from Adolph Gottlieb's Burst series; it's Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old.

The photos' richly textured beauty gives way to repulsion, then back to beauty again. A similar tension operates between feelings of immersion and detachment. Confronting Sudhoff's evidence on her terms — “to allow what is generally invisible to become visible, and to engage with a process from which we have become disconnected” — is both awful and strangely consoling.