Dismantling The Moon was my way of confronting the beauty, history and horror that I saw on my travels in Cambodia in the early 1994.

In the early 1990s, Cambodia had just opened its doors to foreign tourists, and the Khmer Rouge were still a presence in the country. As a freelance photographer I was able to obtain a Kingdom of Cambodia Press Card (which I still have) that gave me free access to both Angor Wat and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which at the time was closed off to locals and many foreigners. Tuol Sleng, a former school, was used as a torture and execution centre by the Khmer Rouge. Along with relics of torture were drawers filled with photographs of people, ostensibly taken, at the moment, of a torturous death.

This piece discusses the recent history written on the faces of present-day Cambodians (1994) along with the images I found in Tuol Sleng. The final installation used slide projections from Angor Wat onto mirrored plexiglass. Images of what I photographed in Tuol Sleng were interwoven with these mirrors, creating a quilt like pattern. The reflection of from the mirrors (Angor Wat) could be seen in the opposing wall.

A large projection of my face looms over the entire installation, with mirrors placed over my eyes, nose and mouth, that were again picked up on the opposing wall. This positioned me as a silent surveyor, prisoner, watcher, voyeur zing the viewer to the exhibition. 

Exhibition:
Dismantling the Moon, Configurations Changeantes (Le Mois de la Photo) show, Galerie VOX, Montréal, QC. Curator: Richard Baillargeon (1995)