Ambient, Aberrant raises questions around the artifice of sightseeing, chasing the sublime, our relationship to Nature (or what we think it is). It comments on the way we experience places through our (phone) cameras, rather than through our senses. In my work I explore the way in which the act of photography (and its expanded practices) mediates our experience of the Natural landscape.
Each artwork undergoes a number of iterations of mediation. When taking photos for example, I sometimes placed prisms or other optical modifiers in front of the lens during in-camera exposure; fragmenting, distorting and abstracting the view. I then subjected some images to a second iteration of mediation during print production, through darkroom interventions—in the colour darkroom during exposure of a negative image onto photosensitive paper I used coloured filters, transmissive objects, light sources or other light modifiers to disrupt the image in some way. This process produces a hybrid image produced partly in-camera and partly in the darkroom.
By laying bare the constructed nature of my light-based works Ambient, Aberrant calls into question the authenticity of the image, of Nature, of any mediated experience. It starts from the premise that the photographic gaze and the tourist gaze emerged at the same time (around 1840) and have been inextricably linked ever since.
2022, Svitlo, Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam, NL
2022, Rethinking Nature, Foto Wien, Vienna, AT
2022, HPR Public Space Exhibition, Platz der Republik, Hamburg, DE
2022, This Art Fair, de Kromhouthal, Amsterdam, NL
2021, Struck by Light, Valid World Hall, Barcelona, ES
2021, Performing the Lens, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, NL
Analogue c-prints (photograph, photograph with darkroom intervention), 90 x 76 cm
Exhibition view — Svitlo, 2022, Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Exhibition view — Struck by Light, 2021, Valid World Hall, Barcelona, Spain