Giselle Giroux

Scratch, Chicken

 

 

Artist Statement

 

My father always had a camera in his hand recording all the events in our lives.  We would gather in the living room and watch as he projected these images from slide onto the 3-foot high screen.  He would tell us how he used a shallow DoF to make this shot or that he had to switch to a telephoto lens for that shot.  All this was Greek to me at the time but it excited him so it excited us all.  He gave me my first camera when I was 13 years old.  I took shots of my friends, my pets, my sisters; I was enamored.  

 

I am still in love with the historical aspect of picture taking but what I strive for even more is the ability to distort the imagination.  I am intrigued by abstract art but anybody can slap some paint on a canvas and call it abstract.  I like the challenge that a camera brings to create an abstract world.  How can I change reality to make the viewer interested, to linger longer, and to question his or her own perceptions? That’s why I look through the viewfinder; I don’t necessarily want to see the world how it is but how I could be. 

 

Scratch, Chicken is a series of portraits taken in my backyard coup where a flock of various breeds peck and scratch their way around the day.  We raise chickens from chicks and some I have a special relationship with, whereas others, like the aggressive rooster, well, he and I just don’t have the same outlook on life.  Some of the portraits are sweet and docile and others are eerily unpleasant in nature, kind of like my feelings towards the rooster.  The film is almost 40 years expired and obviously not well cared for; so unlike the creatures that are reflected on it.  It’s strange, my affection towards chickens, because I do not like any other bird species.  In watching them, I now know where the term, pecking order, comes from.  Each has their own place in the flock and if they try to step out of that range they are promptly reprimanded.  I photographed them at dusk which is the time they are most docile and easiest to handle especially the rooster.   The macro view is not so much for a specimen study but a personality study and to bring them up to our scale in order to contemplate their world.