Cold Tea Blues

(inspired by the song Cold Tea Blues from the album "Pale Sun, Crescent Moon" by Cowboy Junkies, 1993)

The Cold Tea Blues Project is a monument to all the little things that go unpraised between lovers, that which sits untouched and grows cold. When we are young, we give ourselves over to emotion, and do not think it presumptuous to compare our experiences to those of epic figures. As we grow older though, we learn that such emotions are common, and as our familiarity breeds contempt, we grow to hold such emotions in little regard. We hold those stories in regard because they become the chalices that hold our emotions for us, instead of seeing the story of our own lives as being worthy of our feelings. Our emotions resurface at a hundred different points in our lives, while in our stories each only appears a few, grand times.

As adults, emotions only become worthy of contemplation when they are tied to dramatically important situations, instead of everyday acts. We are stung but do not feel we have the right to feel so, and in doing so add further emotion while still trivializing. We feel the Cold Tea Blues and we hold ourselves contemptible for feeling so, not because the emotions themselves are paltry, but because we convince ourselves that the desire to dwell is childish and unproductive. In this dismissal, we throw away too much.

By using female models, I explicitly exclude any representation of myself in this body of work. This choice borders on the sexist in its sardonic repetition of the essential message, because men are often prone to devaluing their emotions by naming them feminine. Much like writers who narrate in the third person when their meaning is too autobiographical, I create a body of self portraiture by removing any hint of myself. Instead, I represent myself through the icons within the images, those moments and objects which speak solely to me of the Cold Tea Blues but made universal through the act of exhibition: most obviously the untouched drink, but also the cell phone, the cast-off shoes, and the empty bed. With this project, I begin to define the lexicon of imagery I plan on explicating throughout my artistic career.