Photography is a medium that allows an artist to assemble and record the effects of several media in a single image. For this reason, I have chosen to this form to exhibit my skills in and passion for design, sculpture, and photography.
Inspired by the artists James Casebere and Patrick Nagatani, I have chosen to construct and photograph tabletop structures of imaginary spaces. My work differs from the works of these artists in purpose and design, as Casebere and Nagatani work to create places that seem to exist, aided by familiar architectural motifs, objects, and scales. The works I have created are meant to reveal an archetypal experience – a place we know the meaning of even though we never were there. However, our work shares a similar intention—to create spaces that evoke memories, feelings, or emotions.
To familiarize myself with the concept of archetypal imagery, I have looked into the work of psychiatrist Carl Jung and his theory of the “collective unconscious,” the area of the mind that acts as a reservoir of symbolic forms. My chosen primordial structure represents “a light at the end of the tunnel” that reveals humanity’s common dreams and deepest imaginings. The images taken within the structures allude to fantastical yet familiar experiences.
I have built these structures with the rudimentary elements of architecture: texture, shape, and scale. The forms themselves exhibit a structural regularity by successively evolving from one to five sided spaces. Here, the viewer observes the development and changes that have taken place during the production period of my work. By increasing the number of structural sides of the forms, I have increased the complexity of the overall build of the structures, incorporating along the way additional design details and variations in light sources. When photographed, the architectural and color lighting designs hint at a manipulation of scale and enhance the surreal, theatrical aspects of the scene. This succeeds, in part, due to the composition and angle from which the space was photographed—a vantage point close to the ceiling, as opposed to the eye-level of a person walking through the space; the juxtaposition between real and artificial color additions similarly creates, for the viewer, a sense of the conceit of the image.
Photographing these tabletop structures helps to clarify the meaning of each object, as the developed images provoke the viewer immediately to associate each image with an archetype; the viewer is meant to envision the visual metaphor of distant light rather than the physical miniature space constructed out of string, wood, and foam. The suggestion of an archetypal experience is a powerful element of these works, in that the images take hold of and direct the viewer’s thoughts. Viewing my photographs in sequential order illuminates their transformations and changes; the images appear, simultaneously, beautiful and frightening, strengthening and weakening. Juxtaposing the structures within images that represent the fantastical and familiar purposefully leads the viewer from concrete experience to abstract thought and highlights the essential fact of life that the unknown will always accompany the known.