REPRESENTATIONS

My series of photographs, Representations, explores the concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality. As a playful homage to the 19th-century British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and his treatise, The Pencil of Nature, I create photographic documents of three-dimensional drawings. I start by collecting everyday objects from the recent past--their designs made obsolete or out of date by changes in technology, taste and time; in other words, a phone or television of today no longer resembles those of the past or even the future. I then whitewash the objects with ordinary house paint as a method of erasure. I then bring them back into view by drawing directly onto their surfaces with charcoal. Recreated as visual hybrids, they blur the boundaries between the two and three dimensional, drawing, photography and sculpture, black-and-white and color, the handmade and the mechanical. The color negatives are printed in the darkroom; no digital manipulation is involved, but the camera's monocular point of view is imperative.

I'm interested in how we learn to see the world, and the role images play in the codification of perceptual and mnemonic experience. By denying certain visual expectations and assumptions, Representations intends to interrupt a more conventional, passive viewing experience, and provoke the viewer into seeing a photograph as if for the first time.