The tragedy of …
The tragedy of space is that it compresses time. It is then that my space of dwelling, of ecstasy, of affinity only exists in my fantasies.
The tragedy of space is that it compresses time. It is then that my space of dwelling, of ecstasy, of affinity only exists in my fantasies.
This is a new statement that will proceed to four images that will be published in a short group book titled ‘Running Out of Time’.
“In other words, as soon as art has become autonomous, it makes a fresh start. It
is therefore salient to consider this start as a sort of phenomenology. On principle,
phenomenology liquidates the past and confronts what is new.”
-Gaston Bachelard
Fighting against time is a constant struggle, ultimately pyrrhic. The sequential
measurement of time, always precise, limits us, yet again, to the physical nature
of reality: the hours of a day, the delays between digital signals, the degenerating
death of cells within our bodies. Yet it is in this conception of time, running out,
that we are able to become aware of such an arbitrary and demanding law. It is in
the revelation of a distinct future that we acknowledge a present and the fleeting
past. Photography is so inherently capable of acquiring such affinity of seeing triple.
However, it is the action of seeing into the future that photography begins to create
new.
These photographs remark on the tropes of absurdity, alienation, and anticipation
to retreat from reality (the present) or any distinct past. The images beg to escape
any distinct origin as the viewer begins to recuperate from any repercussions of
resemblance. When time “runs out” one can only hope to experience a new future
rather than recollect an illusion of the past.
Become aware of your breathing. Manually inhale and exhale, slowly, diligently. The self-conscious action of performing banal tasks seems slightly strange, despite its familiarity. The mode of optical reception is derived from this preconscious state of the mind, from a place where the performance is so familiar that it has become passive. What then is the gesture of pressing the shutter? The self-conscious performance of gazing through the lens, pressing the shutter then heightens the mode of optical reception. The pastness of the photograph seems so inherent yet through this critical awareness, the optical unconscious reveals a strangeness that the fleeting moment could not. Just as the level of concentration increases in breathing.
This reoccurring estrangement from the inherent qualities of reality such as breathing or viewing is then a basis for which my work aims to attach itself. It then further aims for introspection of the viewer’s psyche by disenchanting any inherent anticipation formed in the world or in the home as metaphor. The illusion of repeated recollection – as provided by the history of cultural iconography – is disappointed when the photograph requires an introspection that engages absurdity, alienation, and reasoning. The object is to form disrelationships within the photograph and then stimulate or prod the viewers’ preconceptions and anticipations. History is challenged, not dismissed.
The photograph is meant to socialize. If it merely isolates, it cannot and will not go beyond the surface or even the action of pressing the shutter. My involvement in photography has always been to return to the camera, to the historical precedents set by nearly two centuries of constancy yet invoking a new way of thinking and creating a lexicon between photography, socioeconomic dynamics, psychoanalysis, and the shear immediacy or anticipation of the photograph to reality (or there the lack of).
