Brooklyn / Bognor pt.1
The themes of image and identity, the power of fashion, the myth of ‘self’, ‘place’ and one’s relationship to it, thread through this series by Rebecca Locke. Brooklyn / Bognor captures the artist’s experience of New York City in contrast to her roots by the English seaside. Her return to Bognor signifies a very different life, and an acute awareness of both unwritten social rules and the promise of ‘the city.’ In Brooklyn the artist's experiences included singing in Sufjan Stevens’ band ‘Michigan Militia’, as a drummer in a Puerto Rican country music band and participant of the ‘electroclash’ fringe culture. Whether using photography, mixed media, creative writing or performance, Locke’s practice creates new narratives, often constructed as large scale, hyper-real compositions, saturated with colour. This series of twelve staged photographs utilises montage, performance and lens-based media, long exposures and sunshine, combined with digital layering to construct the narrative. The artist herself features in the images, wearing her Brooklyn clothes -- her uniform of freedom -- now worn in a very different context, the seaside town of Bognor. The images depict the charm and beauty of the English seaside, but hint at the uncanny, something of Brooklyn echoed in Bognor.
Wearing these clothes and making these images in Bognor became a performance, an intervention, an experience in overcoming an emotional resistance against standing out in the small town and a need to conform. Through the rich colours of these constructed scenes, the artist creates a fiction, or 'narrative of place'. Each image is a short story. A move to the city traditionally allows for the creation of a new narrative, a new self. Is it equally possible to reverse this, to create a new narrative of place? In these images, the photograph is an argument and Bognor is redefined, and the myth of place is challenged.
The myth of place and the power of story is further explored through: Brooklyn / Bognor pt. 2