The soft, dreamy experimental photography of Kalliope Amorphous, often featuring self-portraits, is a visual poetics, sometimes black-and-white, sometimes saturated with beautiful, nostalgic color. Techniques of distortion, doubling, mirroring, blurring, and multiple exposure are taken to the extreme, but come together to produce wonderful and arresting images that explore themes of identity, mythology, consciousness, and memory. The loveliness juxtaposes against the alienation expressed through them, such that the subjects are sometimes barely recognizable as human. Fragmented, unfocused, ethereal, fragile, as these murky portraits are, they are also spiritually radiant. Ophelia drowning in her watery bed, twins, and witches are some of the archetypes rendered tangible-but-dreamlike in Kalliope’s unique way. Ominous, tender, suffused with mystery, these images are a perfect fusion of melancholy beauty and striking experimentalism. They are so evocative, strange, hazy, and brilliant.
