my gallery talk

This work is a series of photographs titled “Time Away.” Not all of the images in the series were displayed in the gallery today due to space restrictions. The photographs were produced by shooting with a medium format camera, scanning the negatives into the computer, and printing them using a laser inkjet printer. The images form a narrative without a concrete plot. Some of the images are portraits, while others come across more as landscape images with figures in them.

I understand this work as being about slowness of perception and careful awareness of our surroundings and about respite and a break from routine. My world, and almost everyone else’s, is chaotic and fast paced. I find myself longing for a chance to slow down and rest. I rest at night, yes, but I don’t rest my senses per say and I definitely don’t rest my mind because I am not slowing down enough. in we are constantly inundated with visual and other sensory information. This flood of easily attainable stimulation and information causes us to pay less attention to our surroundings. Why work to obtain information when so much is just given to us, almost forced upon us, via television, the internet, magazines, food packaging, etc? I fear that this phenomenon will expand to have more negative effects on our senses and ability to perceive. Thus, I aim to create photographs that give a sense of slowness that causes the viewer to engage with them more fully. With the work I am trying to call upon viewers to slow down, savor moments, and pay closer, more careful, attention. I often do this by eliminating information from a photograph by specifically highlighting through selective focus and cropping what I want the viewer to engage with.
(talk about focus in Kanga and Uphill- allows for confined reading, full experience of only one aspect)

I also want the images to convey a sense of rest, similar to that which is achieved on vacation. However, I do not want the images to read as snapshots that were or could have been taken on a vacation. During a critique it was brought up that the images were reading in this way because of their uniform size and printing. People felt as if the photographs were moments that had been captured and were being played back, as if in a filmstrip. In order to move away from that reading I though about how the way I present the work effects the meaning. For this exhibition, I am tackling this through size. Changing the sizes of some of the images helps to convey that they are more or less important to the series and in conveying my ideas. I think that changing the size of some of the images causes them to read less like snapshots because they will not be so repetitive, as snapshots from vacations often are. It also causes the reading of the series to slow down because the larger images will take longer to process.

I am taking on a more minimalist approach; give the audience minimal information and make them do work, in this case with their eyes. I don’t want to rock the viewer’s world by making a bold, loud image. I want the viewer to use their senses and become more invested in the world that is already present.