THE STREAM OF LIFE  2012   - Silver gelatin prints hand sewn with linen thread to stonehenge paper with letterpress quotes from Clarice Lispector's "The Stream of Life"

“…the now-instant, which is so fleeting it no longer is because it has already become a new now-instant, which also is no longer.” 
                                   - from The Stream of Life, Clarice Lispector

We live in a cacophonous present, surrounded by images at every moment. Each citizen is adept at image making, and sophisticated at decoding narrative meaning from visual clues. The camera phone records and multiplies the impact of each passing moment. Madison’s project THE STREAM OF LIFE culls the present from pictures in the photographer’s archive. Sifting through black and white snapshots taken in the last ten years and choosing the poetry of lost images to represent the present. The moments in the past become the present as the photographer chooses them, and as the viewer looks at them. The past is a shadow on the moment of the viewing.

THE STREAM OF LIFE is a limited edition artist book inspired and a meditation on the words of Clarice Lispector. The photographs are unified by lines, crosswalks, pathways, or road surface markings. The photographs are hand sewn to the book pages creating additional lines of thread on the images, and interspersed with letterpress prints of text lines from THE STREAM OF LIFE.  The lines that control or conform us to function within society’s boundaries are punctuated with Lispector’s quotes of the “now-instant”, the “want to capture the present” and the desire “ to capture my is.”    2012