Caregiving Projects
Here is a sample of projects done in response to and in collaboration with parenting.
Milk of Many, 2020, Microscopic Photography
When our child was labeled "failure to thrive," we dove into the unregulated shared milk community in an attempt to nourish them with human milk. In the end, we fed our child milk from over two dozen donors. This panel of milk photographs is from milk from four different donors.
Pandemic Letters: #3 for Sylvan (again)
Single-channel video February 2022
This video was created almost three years into the Covid 19 pandemic as an update to the video Pandemic Letter #1 for Sylvan. Footage in this video is shot on various iPhones showing the progression of time from when the pandemic started and our child was two years old until just before their fifth birthday. So far, we have survived this pandemic with little personal loss but not without the stresses that come along with constantly being on for work, for our family, and for our community.
Pandemic Letters: #1 for Sylvan
Single-channel video May 2020
This video was made for FEMeeting Web 2020 femeeting.com/description
This video was created at what we considered to be the beginning of the pandemic as we were trying to figure out how to cope with our new existence under lockdown and how to communicate this new reality to our child. My partner and collaborator Angela Beallor helped record the video, shooting on a DSLR with a macro lens. Our kid turned three right before I wrote this.
A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration
Angela Beallor and Michelle Temple
with Vicki Kereszi, Chanda Lindsay, & Heather Marsh
Video projection - Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press (EP)
Video Documentation - Elizabeth Press (EP) of November 30, 2018 performance.
Live performance featuring six stereo pairs of amplified breast pumps, one contact mic, one amplified phantom pump, audio track, live mixing, and digital projection.
Pumping is a task, a chore, a necessity. That which extracts and collects milk. That which tethers pumper to machine. Tethers feeder to eater. That which nourishes a baby.
Cell(ular) Formations the video projection for A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration
Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press (EP) 2018
This animation is a combination of a microscopic milk video and a photograph. It was inspired by a photograph of collective breastmilk pumping, found in Fannina W. Halle’s 1932 book Die Frau in Sowjetrußland (published in English translation as Woman in Soviet Russia in 1934)