AS I FIND MY WAY IN THE WORLD, I create phantom women and girls who undergo parallel investigations of the self. These inner expeditions take place in cosmic coming-of-age narratives told through images and objects, the playgrounds where my subjects gradually crawl out of their cocoons, unfurl, and blossom. They often begin their wanderings lost and alone, Bambies blinded by headlights and babes in the woods. They stumble into predicaments and compromising situations, stymied by labyrinths, sinkholes, and unsavory characters. Male/female power plays, the desire for rescue, the quest for true love, and ultimately the search for the self, these fraught scenarios are the prisms through which my heroines view their world, searching far and wide for the crumbs littered along the path. Equal parts Dr. Freud and Dr. Frankenstein, fragments of the psyche are collected and reassembled in new combinations with new capabilities. Moments of illumination and even happy endings appear as urchins morph into Amazonian creatures of female prowess, capable of vanquishing their foes and seizing their hearts’ desires.

AFTER RECEIVING HER BA from Georgetown University in philosophy and French, Boody moved to Paris in 1986 to study fashion design at Parsons. There she took an introductory course in photography on a whim and immediately fell in love with the medium. Upon returning to New York, she apprenticed with photographer Hans Namuth for three years and began to combine photography with interactive sculpture. With the advent of Photoshop in the early 1990s, she went on to pioneer a new form of digital photography based on composited imagery.

Boody has exhibited her work widely since the late 1980s. Recent exhibitions include “Radical Terrain” at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York; “Magical Realism” at the Houston Center for Photography; and “Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination” at the Frist Center for Visual Art, Dallas.