Artist’s
Statement
Who
among us hasn’t noticed it—the strange doubling of
forms and faces—the echo in the world? The waves in rock,
the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though
God, deep in his labors, had suddenly run out of ideas, or,
perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set
out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together—the
sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to
the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes
of the dead. A familiar universe. A sea of small recognitions.
A vast brotherhood of thoughts and things. That is what he dreamed.
It
was too late. It didn’t work. We misread intention as accident,
correspondence as coincidence. Only rarely, wandering through
this world, did we feel that someone was trying to tell us something.
–
Mark Slouka, Lost Lake
What can darkness learn from the edge of a thing?
–
Peter Wegner
I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.
–
Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother
These photographs are from a series of explorations of organic forms, isolated by a sweeping beam of light in the dark. I'm especially interested in the visual rhyming relationships among natural forms.
The process I'm using is somewhat unusual, with digital technology replacing not only the darkroom, but the camera as well. I'm shooting with a flatbed scanner, which offers interesting opportunities and limitations. Unlike a camera, a flatbed scanner captures an image by slowly moving both the light and the lens across the subject, essentially lighting and photographing it from multiple angles in one long exposure. This produces a single image stitched together from thousands of tiny slivers, to which I then make endless, minute adjustments.
This offers me a subtly different way of looking at my subjects: a perspective that can't be seen through a camera lens or the naked eye, and a way of illumination that can't be duplicated with fixed lights. It also offers a uniquely detailed view, as I can magnify each image and work on it down to a level of detail that will never be seen in the finished print. High-resolution prints can be as wide as sixty inches.
.
.
|