Aligning Portraits
Assembly Gallery
May, 2005

This project has risen from my own struggle to connect my body to the world around me. My desire is to examine the relationship that is had with our bodies as women.
Are these relationships based on shame, reverence, or anger?
Were they formed in the careless comment from a relative; the way your classmates reacted to your body as it was awkward and young; or in the way a lover offered affirmation?
I have felt very alone in my shame; alone in my relationship with my body, but as I have offered my vulnerability, I have been met. This exploration of many women’s stories has offered one common theme-there is a longing to release the old definitions and embrace a new relationship with the body that is free from shame.

“We need liberation, perpetual revolution. What better place to begin the insurrection than at the doors to the palace we’ve lived in all these years?”
Woman-An Intimate Geography
-Natalie Angier