Alison Mosshart’s New Photo Series Captures Life on the Road
“We roll into town, we set up our lights our amps our stage, the people arrive, the show happens, and a few hours later, us and everything we built, is broken down, packed away, and gone,” said Alison Mosshart of what it’s like to constantly be touring with her band The Kills alongside Jamie Hince. So she captured it all with an instant camera, titling the series “This No Longer Exists” for a show by the Impossible Project in Berlin. Take a look, here.
“The artist Mike Kelly turned me on to stuffed animals when he did the record sleeve for Sonic Youth’s ‘Dirty’. He allowed me to see them differently, as signifiers of time, happiness, failure, neglect, trash – the inevitable end of naivety. Nothing is forever, certainly youth, and certainly our ability to attach magical thinking to inanimate objects, is tested by reality eventually. Things are just things, or so we’d like to forget or never discover. The man who gave me that bear eventually disappeared, then- so did the bear’s ‘personality’. What it meant then, is not what it means now. The mind is our lens through which we see and conceive, and we are always changing our minds.”
“Well… the front end of this [car] doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve got a love for wrecks, crushed steal and big machines that once cruised gracefully through the streets, only to eventually become sedentary duds of twisted junk. It’s glory days are over, but it is no less beautiful to me. And since I don’t know the story, I get to imagine one. I can think anything in the whole wide world I want as I walk by.”
“Hair in front of the face, and the view of the back of someone’s head, has always been interesting to me. Faceless and out of tune. To me it speaks of coming and going with no here, or, being present but not totally there. Hiding in plain sight and leaving without a look. There’s something heavy and disparate about it. Unattached. Over before it starts. These are totally uncommitted self portraits.”
“I love helicopters. I view them the same way I view fireworks in the sky. Like dressing or decoration on the horizon. I spent a lot of time working in Hollywood last year, and they were always flying over, police helicopters looking for people on the run, stolen cars, etc. It costs thousands of taxpayers’ dollars just to get em off the ground, and you see 50 of them a day up there whizzing around like demented bats. They go up and they come down. After a few months, I started to think they were just there for my entertainment.”
“The skull over my brothers face was the start of a mini series of double exposures I made, where I was pretending to have x-ray vision. The photo fit the bill, because after working on these, I became convinced I do not have x-ray vision. Maybe I used to, but I lost it.”
“I’ve been taking photos of my hotel beds for many years. Like the traveling circus stage up/stage down, roll in/roll out – this is much the same. All these hundreds of beds I sleep in, a different one every night… nights of sleep and sleeplessness, bad dreams in foreign countries, sweet dreams in random cities, alone and sometimes not, who cares where and who cares what- when I wake up in the morning I take a photo of the bedsheets for posterity, because ‘I was here’… much like people take a snap of the Eiffel tower or the beach, an ugly statue or some pornographic looking basket of bread they’ve just been served. We are compelled to be part of our own lives, and part of that is acting on our desire to make sure we don’t forget what we’ll definitely forget. How often we are compelled to take photos of nothing to remind us of something – that no longer exists.”
