Judith Shimer - Letter J

Judith Shimer

Like all young women, I suffer from low self-esteem. I therapeutically confront my insecurities, say them out loud, take a picture of them, blow them up 10 times, paint them, write a song about them, take video of them, and tack them to my studio wall. Many of these works are serial. My two current projects-in-progress are The Diary Project and Mouths. Mouths is an effort to neutralize my feelings about my crooked teeth. In 2010, I took 36 webcam snapshots of my mouth forming 36 sounds in the English language, and began painting these mouths onto 12”x12” panels in pink and blue acrylic paint. The Diary Project began this fall when I spread fourteen diaries in spiral-bound notebooks, which I’d filled between 2001 and 2006, on the floor of my studio and started reading them for the first time since writing them. As I read sitting in front of a typewriter, I transcribe excerpts, and then select certain excerpts to read in front of the camera. The final video cuts together these readings, self-interviews, and documentation of spontaneous side-projects such as throwing a fifteenth birthday party, or ripping out notebook pages and sewing them into paper balloons.