PORTRAITURE FOR POSSIBLE OBJECTS
These photographs are part of my wider work, whereby I pursue experimentation with so-called “tableau, staged or choreographed” photography, in conjunction with reflection on the concept “in/completeness” in its various guises.
This particular series takes two directions. First, the images are a record of temporary constructs that were made using rods, wire, planes, wood or cardboard and other surfaces, and shaped into simple geometric forms. I build them for the camera and then dismantle them. The objects are not intended to survive as autonomous sculptures. Rather, the photographic record itself will outlast the objects being recorded.
Accordingly, these constructions are deliberately provisional … but, moreover, they are depicted in such a way as to make them appear subtly off-kilter, imbalanced, or otherwise visually incomplete. The images emphasize the more overtly formal aspects of the objects being portrayed, and I’ve tried to render them as just barely “possible objects”.
The series is a meditation on our implicit expectations of visual completeness, our impulse to fill out visual structures that are, in themselves, partial and deficient, ... even in circumstances where such expectations cannot be realized or otherwise satisfied.
I’m interested in creating moments wherein looking becomes a speculative act: moments when our vision tries to finalize a form that is unfinished, to stabilize things that will not readily cohere, or that may cohere but only temporarily, etc. As with the physical materials and the constructions themselves, the visual objects (i.e., the prints or digital images) likewise do not achieve self-sufficiency ... they never quite resolve or cohere, at least not in any form that is satisfactorily and completely meaningful.
Put differently, the series asks if what we experience as coherence belongs to the thing before us, as the purported “thing itself”, or if, on the other hand, meaning is supplied by the act of looking. I ask the viewer to consider how readily we make wholes from fragments, continuity from interruption, and durable forms from things that were not meant to last.
I leave it up to the viewer to consider if these visually based reflections and intellectual exercises might have broader parallels or far wider implications ... for example, with respect to the possibility of a completed, and ultimately coherent “life narrative”, etc.
