L’Absinthe (after Degas), 2025
"For this new project, I turned my attention to Edgar Degas’ L’Absinthe, a painting that has long fascinated me for its quiet tension, psychological weight, and what I have always read as a nod toward what in 1875 would have been the emerging medium of photography. I reconstructed the scene in my studio, building a life-sized version of the original café setting and working with two life models to inhabit the roles of the painting’s figures.
The result is a series of videos and photographs that chart a slow unraveling. In some images, we see an almost exact replica of the original -- down to the angle of the bodies and the shadows or reflections on the wall behind them. In others, the illusion begins to fray: the performers wear their own street clothes, the set begins to show its seams, and the boundaries between past and present, fiction and construction, become porous.
As with much of my work, this project explores the tension between stillness and performance, surface and psychology. It’s about how we inhabit images, and how images inhabit us. In L’Absinthe (After Degas), I’m not simply recreating a painting, I’m pulling it apart and sticking it back together, moment by moment. " - AH