I Can See The Men Hidden In The Forest

“I Can See The Men Hidden In The Forest” is a speculative interpretation of the photographic images in Sadie Murdoch’s artist’s pages for the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. In her writing, the artist generates associative and affective connections between the material and performative aspects of the production of one particular art work and its gendered historical reference points. The text begins with a description of Murdoch’s “Je Peux Voir les Hommes Cachés dans la Forêt” (2016), a seventeen panel photomontage, derived from a composite image published in “La Révolution Surrealist” in 1929. Various stages of the construction and execution of Murdoch’s photomontage are recorded in the seven photographic images. As the text unfolds, a dreamlike narrative shifts the explicit references to other artists and artworks into and out of moments of intimate fantasy, proposing a correlation between the form of the anagram and the photographic negative.