Exhibition statement by Lucie March, Martha Schnee, and Lena Warnke
We deal in desire and collaboration. We are Somerville neighbors who have been friends since high school. We are lovers who met at a lesbian wedding down the street. We are sisters who have been photographing each other for a decade. This exhibition is an invitation into the soft tissue of our lives.
Each of us – Lena, Martha, and Lucie – is both photographer and subject. We share rolls of film, to the point where it’s often a guessing game as to who made which picture. We have relinquished individual ownership of our work, choosing not to attribute specific images to any one of us. Rather, these photographs stretch into a web of relations, a communal process of looking and being looked at. A dish on the stove, kissing, swimming: the tender core of the experience of living alongside each other.
The camera is involved in our intimacy and our community; making photographs is a part of our relationships. We work exclusively with film, reveling in slowness and anticipation. With each photograph made, a process of remembering begins. We press the shutter and we wait – weeks, months, even years. In that time, we imagine many lives for ourselves. And no matter what we’ve imagined, the image itself – the photograph – is always something else. We try it all on for size, editing our memories of the moment. A loop begins to form: the real becomes the imagined, becomes the real, becomes the imagined.
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other, you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed: our friend the poet comes into my room where I’ve been writing for days, […] and I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. You’ve kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .¹
We dreamed we were photographs. Our images have as much to do with forgetting as they do with remembering. By process of elimination – by photographing – we shape ourselves. We whittle our memories down to their essence. As Rich put it, the story of our lives becomes our lives.2
¹ Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem II], 1977
² Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem XVIII], 1977
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About the Artists
Lucie March
Lucie March (b. 1992) is an artist working with the still and moving image. She makes work about geological time and memory and that feeling you get when you close your eyes and the sun comes through your eyelids. She recently completed her MFA in Photography at MassArt, and is the recipient of the 2023-2024 MassArt Postgraduate Teaching Fellowship. She co-creates the quarterly zine cul de sac with Marie and lives in Somerville, MA.
Martha Schnee
Martha Schnee (b. 1993) works across printmaking, drawing, text, sound, photography, and arts education. She creates work with her band/art collective sidebody and co-directs sidebody press with Lena. She also teaches Studio for Drawing at MassArt and youth leadership at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She holds an Ed.M. from Harvard University and is pursuing her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Lena Warnke
Lena Warnke (b. 1992) is a bookmaker, photographer, and cognitive scientist based in Somerville, MA. She walks around, looks at things, and talks to her neighbors. She is a member of the band and art collective sidebody, and co-directs sidebody press with Martha. Lena holds a PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychology from Tufts University and teaches at Wellesley College.
I wake up in your bed is a Gallery 263 Exhibition Proposal Series show, a program in which exhibitions are selected as part of a competitive jury process.
Press
Best Photo Picks March 2024 by Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy for What Will You Remember?