2014 > Photo/Material Abstractions

The works in this series are at the very least photographic. They are direct photographs of something (curtains, window blinds, painters tape, primed canvases). But the final output might not actually be considered by some as a photograph. Inkjet is the predominant substance used for printing a photograph in this digital era. I use inkjet and translucent fabric to refer the transparency of a photograph on one hand, and on the other, foreground its opacity as tangible, physical presence in a world overwhelmed by screen spaces.

The materiality of the photograph has always had very particular links to the sculptural and painterly. Having a studio practice that also concurrently includes sculpture and painting allows me to explore a blurring of boundaries between mediums. However, I’m also very interested in making something new out of a work that might be have been otherwise discarded (primed over failed paintings), or simply considered a means to an end for another project (used masking tape grids for a painting in my studio). In these works, there are references to the discarded in painting with the painter’s tape as a consistent theme. There are references to the discarded sculpture with the piles of fabric on the floor, or the fabric as a ground on which to print. There are references to Photoshop as echoed by the way that many of my works are translucent images physically layered upon one another, or on other materials.

All of these ‘gains’ from other elements of my studio practice coalesce in these ongoing experiments that explore the malleability and materiality of the photograph. This search for a simultaneous resolution and disruption in playing with the limits of what “only photography” might mean is what it means to me to be a photographer today.