People of the world have demonstrated, given the ubiquity of camera footage, that they are willing to put faith in captured reality. While this faith is not misplaced, the truth is that the camera in an imprecise machine. Inherently static and flat, a photograph says as much through suggestion as it does through content. As a narrator enunciates and elaborates, a camera focuses and blurs. And when pushed to its limits, a camera can be used to flat-out lie. It is in this translation between reality and the printed image that a photographer operates.
In my pieces I strive to use
the camera to deceive, to push my viewer’s trust to the limit and
suggest, plausibly, an implausible world. I built landscapes on a
scale much too small to explore, but by documenting them, I aimed to
allow the viewer access. These landscapes are admittedly
fanciful, and even the figures that explore them are stand-ins, not
real people. Any objective observation will reveal that I have in
fact enlarged miniature worlds, but our subconscious expectation of a
landscape photograph, or most any photograph, is that the image has
been reduced. And so the viewer plays an integral part in the
success of photography—scaling, replacing, immersing.
Photographer
Thomas Demand creates life-size near-replicas of domestic and
industrial scenes using mainly cardboard and paper. His work is
often said to confront the artifice of photography, but what he more
simply does, as I have done, is document sculpture. The sculpture
is his statement, and the photography is his voice. Likewise,
I’ve created specific worlds I aim to explore, and photography is the
means to that end.
In my work, I struggle with not only the
interplay between human behavior and the rest of the natural world, but
also the way our behavior plays back upon us. The suffix
“–scape,” so frequently reappropriated now, found its initial way into
English vocabulary as an artistic term, more specifically describing
our perception and execution of a scene than the actual scene
itself. In this sense, my pieces represent my imposed perception
of humanity. The materials I use, though sometimes inscrutable,
are all representative of our human revision upon natural disarray.
My first piece in the series is based on a 16th century painting by Jacopo Bassano, The Garden of Eden, depicting Adam and Eve peering into the distance at a beautiful sunset. But the pieces in this show, while allegorical, are not specifically religious. I may not believe in a theological Eden, but I do believe in a theoretical one—the space beyond a chronically imperfect life. As the photograph is a twisted approximation of the source scene, so the landscape is a plastic approximation of that perfect garden. Conversely, my last piece in the series, built with molded bread, presents a landscape overrun by the natural and unrevised by the two characters walking through it. It is no garden, and thrives in a place beyond the limits of landscaping. The remaining photographs catalogue our heroes’ evolution within the world, in all its constant, churning imperfection, as they strive to return “home.”
Thus I
aim to give the viewers a chance to view the Fall in a modern light, to
question and wonder at human achievement. I catalogue our human
instincts—produce, consume, build, destroy, expand—in a loving
way. I do not believe they are inherently catastrophic, and are
certainly not what determines our humanity. It is our intellect
and our creativity—the same tools that allow artists to create art—that
elevate us to a different plane. And that is where we begin to
understand Eden, and thereby, if only fleetingly, believe in it.