Story Noº 16 / 151: It Feels Like Years

Noº 16/151: It Feels Like Years
Collection: Sundays in the Solarium

There are moments when being an artist is remarkably similar to having a very specific fetish and enough confidence to explain it.

Six years ago, I invited Gabe to my apartment in New York and asked them to take off their clothes and sit at my piano. Then I asked if I could put a beetle on their back.

A real one. Dead, admittedly. But real.
Fortunately, Gabe said yes.

I placed the beetle against their skin, photographed it, moved it, photographed it again, then combined those moments until one beetle became many, crawling along their back.

Insects appear throughout my work. Usually they’re evidence that something happening inside the body has found its way out. A thought. A feeling. An instinct you haven’t quite learned how to name.

At the time, I thought the beetles in this photograph were fear.

Then I opened the photograph again this summer, and I wanted to touch it.

I changed the environment. Reworked the light. Let the photograph become less like something surreal happening inside an apartment and more like a place that could exist entirely according to its own rules.

Building the world of my video game has made me realize some of these older photographs were places I wanted to get inside again.

Looking at the photograph now, I don’t see fear anymore. I see something emerging. And I’m no longer convinced that whatever comes crawling out of us needs to be frightening.

The original photograph had another name. This version is called It Feels Like Years. It does.

I’ve spent some time recently returning to a small group of earlier photographs this way—not correcting them, but seeing what happens when I get my hands on them again.

A second version. Another life.

You can see some of the newly revisited photographs below.

If this was worth your time, pass it on.

This work will become a book.
Photographs and field notes by James Miille
Words by Jona Montoya