Julie Mack

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

A beautiful family photograph can make me want the life it appears to prove. For more than two decades I have constructed portraits with the families I was given, entered, and made. "Evidence & Fiction" runs on a pleasure I know well — finding a place in an arrangement. That promise of belonging becomes a contract that binds us to how we are allowed to appear. I grew up in white, middle-American rooms where whiteness did its work by disappearing into the furniture, letting one family's way of living stand for family itself. "Lesbians", the chosen-family arm, grows from the queer relationships through which I have made a life. As a butch dyke, I want a place in the picture and room to invent how I occupy it. A sitter's fantasy, refusal, or private joke can redirect the scene I am building. The picture can keep changing long after the sitting. I photograph multiple versions using medium- and large-format film, returning to earlier frames as the relationships change. I composite frames from different moments; in large chromogenic prints they share one persuasive surface. I set the photographs against one another so each changes what the others appear to prove. A pose that seems inevitable in one room can become strange, erotic, or absurd in the next. A fiction can give us a way to recognize one another before we have words for it. I make these arrangements, and still want the belonging they promise.

Artwork