Kalliope Amorphous

Kalliope Amorphous (born 1978^[1]) is an American visual artist, poet, fine-art photographer, and performance artist. She lives and works in New York. Amorphous is best known for her extensive work in self portrait photography.

Style

Amorphous is known for her use of in-camera effects, modified lenses, mirrors, and handmade camera attachments. Her style, as she describes it, is conceptual photography with an emphasis on pictorialism and surrealism.^[2] Acting as her own model, Amorphous explores the meaning of identity by assuming different roles.^[3] Amorphous has stated that the "study of consciousness"^[4] and the concept of duende^[5] are primary influences in her work. She has also cited butoh as an influence.^[6]

Overview

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Amorphous attended high school in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Upon graduating, she moved to New York, where she experimented with modeling, acting, and performance poetry. In a 2008 interview with art critic Brian Sherwin, she cited her early social involvement in the New York City theater and cabaret scenes as influences in her early photographic work.^[7]

A self-taught photographer, Amorphous began working exclusively with self-portrait photography while living in Rhode Island in 2007. Her early self-portraits focused on character studies, costuming, and makeup.^[8] Though she rarely exhibits her early character studies, one of her self-portraits as a female Christ appears in the trailer for the novel A New Covenant by Erec Stebbins.^[9]

Amorphous' photographs began to gain international attention after the completion in 2009 of her Resurrecting Ophelia series of self-portraits as the fictional character Ophelia. Like much of her later work, the series relied on in-camera effect with Amorphous positioned behind glass, acrylic, and textiles.^[10] The series first launched in Amorphous' hometown in a solo exhibition at the Community College of Rhode Island^[11] and first appeared in print in the premier issues of Dark Beauty magazine^[12] and The Omen Magazine^[13]

Amorphous' work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, in print, and on the Internet. She is often referenced for her significant body of self portrait photographs as well as for her experiments with creative in camera techniques such as the use of a stroboscope^[14] and the experimental use of mirrors.

In 2011, Amorphous was named one of the top 100 artists by GLAAD.^[15] She is a recipient of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for self-portraiture.^[16]

Amorphous's recent projects use distortion mirror boards created with reflective material. In her series Glass Houses, she appears in a series of surreal and distorted self-portraits which look as if they were submerged in water.^[17] Of the series, Lancia Trendvisions wrote: "The mirror is just a surface. Exactly like the photographs that portray it. They cannot depict what is hidden under their patina: the distortions of our fears, the destructuring push of our desires. But photographer Kalliope Amorphous searches for just that impalpable spirit." ^[18] In her distorted self-portraits, the artist explores what she calls "the fluid nature of identity".^[19]

In addition to self-portraits, Amorphous began working with glitch art in 2013. In 2014, she completed a series of experimental photographs of performance artist Marina Abramovic. Amorphous appears opposite Matthew Avedon in the music video Savage Way to Live for the Brooklyn-based band Relations.^[20]

References

External links

• Official Website
• Kalliope Amorphous at AFK Gallery
• Huffington Post Interview
• Dazed Digital Interview