Cathedral of the Pines

Mother and Daughter, The Mattress and Cathedral of the Pines form part of a series of thirty-one photographs entitled Cathedral of the Pines. Set in the small rural town of Becket in Massachusetts, these photographs – which evoke the pictorial tradition of the 19th century – depict static, silent figures in ambiguous indoor or outdoor scenes. Through their staging, these various situations – which at first glance seem familiar – exude an air of mystery in which drama lies just beneath the surface.

Take Mother and Daughter, for instance, in which we see a mother and her daughter sitting on a sofa, their gazes lost in the void and their bodies limp, as if lifeless and cut off from themselves. The half-open bay window in the living room where they are sitting lets in the surrounding snow, whose colour blends into the carpet on the floor, thereby erasing the reassuring boundary between the supposed warmth of the ‘home’ and the potential violence of the outside world. Footprints visible in the snow suggest that an invisible presence has just entered or left the house, leaving the mother and daughter in a state of torpor. Set in a forest, The Mattress shows a man standing motionless in front of a mattress abandoned by the side of a path, where a police car and another car—one of whose doors remains open—are parked. The identity of this man and the nature of the events that took place here remain unclear, making them all the more unsettling.

Cathedral of the Pines, the title of the eponymous series, is the name of a forest trail that inspired the artist to launch this series, which explores more intimate themes such as isolation and loneliness. The photograph shows a man in a shirt on his skis in the snow, facing a garden shed serving as a rustic toilet, from which discarded women’s underwear can be seen. Who do they belong to?