Long before I began altering found film images, I was already absorbing and remaking them. Growing up in the 1970s, I was captivated by the glamorous world of 1960s movies and television—the clothes, interiors, romance, and over-the-top drama, but also their highly constructed ideas about masculinity and femininity. I reenacted that world through childhood play: dress up, posing for photographs, inventing stories with Barbies, play-acting, and making Super 8 movies. Decades later, I find myself returning to these images, now with an adult awareness of the ways they helped shape my understanding of gender, desire, and the roles men and women perform.

In this series, I return to that visual language through movie lobby cards from the 1960s and 1970s. Originally created to promote films, these photographs distill complicated stories into seductive moments of romance, confrontation, danger and desire.

I leave the women largely untouched while transforming the men, overlaying their bodies with flowers, landscapes, abstraction and pattern. Sometimes these interventions harmonize with the colors and movement of the original photograph; at other times they deliberately contradict its mood. A threatening figure can become floral or whimsical. A romantic lead can dissolve into abstraction. A man’s aggressive gesture can become theatrical, needy or absurd.

The transformation shifts my attention back to the women. In a sense, I see myself in all of them. I identify affectionately and humorously with their familiar roles—not only as cinematic types, but as versions of experiences I recognize in my own life and in growing up as a woman. They can be passive or powerful, interested or bored, pursued or pursuing, submissive or controlling. I recognize the persistence of these old dynamics in contemporary life, and the complicated ways we can resist them, participate in them, and sometimes take pleasure in them.

The altered men are equally unstable. They can be diminished, feminized, made ridiculous or transformed into archetypes, but they can also become more alluring. Pattern turns them into surfaces for projection—objects of fantasy onto which the viewer can impose a story.

The imagery I use to transform the male figures comes from magazines I subscribe to—Artforum, Vogue, and Aperture—and often incorporates fragments of other artists’ work. I am interested in bringing these contemporary images into contact with the appropriated film stills, layering one visual culture onto another. Images circulating around me now interrupt images that surrounded me growing up. Through cropping, juxtaposition and recombination, past and present occupy the same picture, creating new relationships between images that were never intended to meet.

Humor allows me to question these images without rejecting the pleasure they offer. I want the works to function first as eye candy: beautiful, strange, seductive and slightly unsettling. But beneath that surface, I hope they become portals into our own relationship with familiar stories about men and women.

I don’t see myself as rewriting these photographs so much as revealing something that was already there. By disrupting one figure, the original choreography becomes newly visible: the pursuit, resistance, aggression, boredom, seduction, vulnerability and performance embedded within the image. The story hasn’t disappeared. We are simply being asked to look at it again.