Tammy Rae Carland: Lesbian Beds

The series was inspired by the ‘bed paintings’ created by and between Jasper Johns and Robert Raushenburg during their quiet stint as lovers. The photographs are closely cropped aerial views of lesbian beds, formally composed and edited to conceptually resemble abstract expressionist and color field paintings. I have photographed the beds after they have been slept in and have left them as found and with natural light. With these images I want to make photographs that formally and conceptually pass as modernist paintings - at least from a slight distance or at a casual glance. With the use of formal tropes such as color, light and shape there are references to the paintings of Rothko, Frankenthaler, Johns, Raushenburg, Kline, and many others. Conceptually and formally I am emphasizing the trace of the body (or bodies) that have recently departed the bed, focusing on the imprint or objects left behind. Conceptually and formally I am emphasizing the trace of the body (or bodies) that have recently departed the bed, focusing on the imprint or objects left behind. I am also playing with the pun of “lesbian bed death”, an in-house community term that suggests that lesbians become nonsexual beings once domesticated. I am also trying to evoke Roland Barthes’ notion of a photograph being a “little death” and how that has always played off of the metaphor of the male orgasm as a “little death”. In other words I wanted to reinsert a non-heteronormative women’s sexuality into and onto photographic discourse, art history and domestic sites of pleasure and intimacy.

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