ARTIST STATEMENT
My name is Susan Clarahan, I was raised by a river in the Rocky Mountains of Treaty 7 Territory.
Most of what I know comes from a mountain valley in Canmore, Alberta, the homeland of the Stoney Nakoda, Blackfoot Confederacy, and Tsuut’ina nations, along with calypso orchids, alpine glow cougars, golden grizzlies, and not far from the Sleeping Buffalo Guardian Mountain that dreams from the Bow River. My work lives and dreams at the intersection of three rivers of power: symbols, systems, and our erotic body.
Photography, holography, and sculpture depict sapphic eroticism and the hidden dimension of pleasure in ways that have been forbidden. Pussy on pussy sex, cosmic bodies, religious ecstasy, multiple orgasms, gushing, sliding, wetness. Motifs, metaphors, and natural materials bring into focus the embodied experience of our erotic power – We return pleasure to the centre for building knowledge, personal agency, and collective resistance. We create a space to honour our erotic bodies, and to resist patriarchy, phallocentrism, and the imperialist image and imagination.
In the darkrooms I spend time in the darkness, the slow-time based medium of analog film draws out the meditation on states of pleasure. My practice in analog photography takes a feminine approach: I do not emphasize focus, clarity, containment, order, or “proper” exposure—it is my intentional decision to challenge this medium that is focused on the “correct” technique, employing double exposures, reciprocity, light leeks, and glitches: blurring linear singular perspective and time.