Artist Statement
When we ‘see’ a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. - John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Temporal Presence is a liminal landscape of a documentary space, a transitional changing neighborhood over the course of a year. Part record and part performance, these interpolated digital-images create long manipulated panoramic photographs. They are a recording of the movement of my body and interpretation to a connected lens. These photographs jar, bend, break, and reconnect to the horizon. Walking down the street the open lens records an indecisive moment, creating a fragmented landscape of moving in a space. A portrait of a place and time. There is a tempo to the movement in the image, a sequence of steps on the pavement falling into a black void at the borders.
Similar to lomo-cameras, this work is made with the crude lens of a mobile phone. The difference is the light reflecting back to the camera becomes data interpreted by computer software to seamlessly connect pixels. This tool is interrupted through movement creating a visual disconnection in the photographs, like a reality-glitch ghost in the machine. As we navigate our contemporary world through media in a land of fake news. These works touch upon the experience of multiple perspectives of how we arrive at a sense of experiencing an authentic place. These photographs reflect a real landscape and simultaneously a constructed space. Creating a sense of a psychological landscape that is split in duo between reality and simulation.
This work is connected to my public practice, made over the course of a year 2023 as a reaction to place. At the time I lived in Garfield Park Indianapolis and this project was a response to safety walks conducted by the adjacent Bean Creek neighborhood association. Connected to site and presence these images document a transitioning neighborhood during my daily walks. Each image is an open-lens record of my steps down the street hacking the cell-camera in my pocket to record like a long continuous scanner-camera.