Found Rifts: Nature, Distorted
Photography, I believe, can be a continuation of philosophy by other means. Traditional landscape photography gazes outward, intent on delivering an "authentic" image of nature—pristine, razor-sharp, impeccably composed, and vividly saturated. Yet it often delivers not reality but a hyper-reality: cleaner, more spectacular, more enthralling than anything truly wild. My work seeks the opposite: it deals in "found non-objects"—the unseen gaps and rifts in nature. I am drawn to those subtle inconsistencies and lacunae—absences that are overlooked because we insist on domesticating the natural world … because we impose our own ideas and boundaries onto the land.
Admittedly, this is nearly an impossible task: how does one capture a rift that is itself invisible, present only as a faint intuition at the edges of perception? We do so by amplifying that intuition, and open ourselves up to the fact that nature does indeed harbour voids. Contrary to our pastoral myths, it is not uniformly benign or fulfilling; often it unsettles, sometimes it terrifies. Indeed, nature's inherent incompleteness—and our own incomplete grasp of it—drives us to obsessively map and reorder the world. … Indeed, perhaps it is this underlying fear that drives some of us to produce agonizingly detailed, bucolic, domesticated images of a docile nature.
In opposition to this kind of attitude, I confront the viewer with landscapes that barely coalesce into recognizable scenes. These photographs invoke Lyotard's notion of the postmodern sublime, in which art "presents the existence of the unpresentable." Here, the unpresentable is the wild, unfinished essence of nature itself. By design, the images frustrate our desire for clarity: a blurred void can evoke the sublime more powerfully than any pristine vista. I embrace severe abstraction to heighten emotional resonance. The absence at each image's center symbolizes nature's unknowability in an age of irrevocable environmental change. For me, these images hold a quiet terror—a sense of nature disappearing into unreadability. Yet perhaps there is a dark beauty as well; that tension between dread and beauty is, possibly, a hallmark of the sublime.