Recognized for her work on photographic intimacy in prison, photographer Dorothy-Shoes has developed challenging and socially engaging work that establishes a constant reflexion on the concept of staging. Originally involved in comedy and theatre, she draws on her first passions for prolegomena with a meticulously elaborate aesthetic and total formal freedom.
ColèresS planquées (Hidden Anger), her latest series, came from a particular circumstance. In 2012, as she was just turning thirty-three, Dorothy-Shoes learned that she had multiple sclerosis. “At the diagnosis of my illness, I knew right away that I had to transform this most disturbing information into creative material,” she explains. Like a journal, she undertook photographically transcribing the fears and symptoms caused by this illness little known to the general public.
To create these types of “distanced self-portraits”, Dorothy-Shoes asked women, close and distant, to interpret scenarios inspired in her by listening, with attention and concern, to her own body. In this statement, through about fifty photographs, the work takes on a unique and precise character that, perhaps, aims to conjure fear, but also, more essentially, initiates an ode to life and weaves the threads of alterity into action. ColèresS planquées is an anagram of the French phrase for multiple sclerosis, sclérose en plaques.
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Actes Sud
18, rue Séguier 75006 Paris, France
December 10, 2017 to January 10, 2018
