Sympathetic Magic tracks, analyzes and reinterprets the photograph as evidence, as icon and the desire for spirituality, and answers through a year long collection of aura images processed through an instructional video and photographs.
An aura, or energy field, is both poetic and metaphysical in its imaging of a desire to believe in something larger and to form a guide to being. The photographs are reinterpreted through ritual in order to form an understanding of being, with full awareness that an understanding is not necessarily an answer and may in fact be futile. The piece takes a current condition of searching as its starting point – we live in a world in which questions lead down internet rabbit holes, self portraits are constructed based on inner desires and paraded online.
The idea of sympathetic magic holds a certain power – this hand has been read, its touch transferred to another’s touch – like affects like. The spiritual becomes science, the scientific becomes spiritual. In certain ideologic theories, you believe through your material practices, which means that you can believe even if you have a cynical relationship toward those practices.
We need but do not need, want but do not want; we toe the line looking to the “other” for answers while weighing it with skepticism and writing it off, only to return to vague proclamations to see where we fit. Through this ritual of posting, pulling, borrowing, joining, having a photograph taken every two weeks begins to instill a halfbelief, something to hold onto as evidence. By linking traditions with pseudoscience filtered through an instructional body, an alternate window of possibility and comprehension is constructed. The narrative of the video is an open guide, providing vague information to construct a personalized reading of not only the auras but also the entire process of having these objects made.
