Ally Christmas says, "The photograph is a vessel for representation, for somehow binding the human body to the world. How, then, does that representation and subsequent binding become complicated or disrupted through the violent act of manipulating one’s own representation?

In this series of images (made as part of a larger body of worked titled pleasing memory picture between 2016-2017), I picked key memories from my personal archive and content-aware filled myself out.

This self-inflicted wounding – puncturing the photos with the spot healing brush and the clone stamp – became a strategy for testing the bounds and reliability of my actual memory. The more time passes between the edits and my present moment, the less I actually remember the details of the lived experiences the photos once documented."

Ally Christmas is a visual artist from the Northern VA area, currently living and working out of Shepherdstown, WV. Much of her work revolves around notions of selfhood, virtuality, and lived experience, and her hybrid practice involves a number of forms including digital video, still photography, tintypes, palladium prints, bookmaking, gifs, cinemagraphs, and installation. Outside of her personal art practice, she teaches lens-based media as an Assistant Professor of Art and serves as the coordinator of the BFA Photo program at Shepherd University.

Career Highlights-

Christmas’s work has been shown at a wide variety of venues, including bitforms gallery in New York City; aCinema’s aDifferent Festival in Milwaukee; ATHICA in Athens, GA; Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, GA; the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO; and the Alternative Film Festival in Toronto, where her video piece, Syncing, won the festival award for Best Web Series. After earning her MFA in Photo & Video from the University of Georgia in 2018, Christmas spent two years teaching video art and photography courses at Grinnell College as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Video and New Media.


 IMAGES FOR SALE -
 
Ash, ’96
8”H x 10”W
Archival Inkjet Print
$150 unframed
 
First Day
8”H x 10”W
Archival Inkjet Print
$150 unframed
 
Nesting Dolls
8”H x 10”W
Archival Inkjet Print
$150 unframed
 
Soft Piles
8”H x 10”W
Archival Inkjet Print
$150 unframed
 
Someone’s Birthday (Not Mine)
10”H x 8”W
Archival Inkjet Print
$150 unframed
 
World Cup
8”H x 10”W
Archival Inkjet Print
$150 unframed
 
 
Contact: Ally Christmas 
allybeephoto@gmail.com

Website: www.allychristmas.com
Instagram:
www.instagram.com/allychristmas