Photography 2000-2009
Voluminous Trace Series, 2009
(Voluminous Trace Series), photogram, Public Art Project in Parking-lot Kiosk Light Boxes, 2009, 48” x 56”
In these works the ghost-like spectral force of the image is emphasized in two ways, the first deals with the unrealized aspect of repurpousing military technologies for real future ecological needs the second is the fossilized trace of outdated modes of thinking. In this case militarism as such may be equated with a failure to consider the wider sphere of biological life.
The initial plastic models were constructed to mimic the process of using repurposed military technologies to heal damaged parts of the environment. Just as Spitfires and other planes were used after WW2 as crop dusters or civilian ocean liners became hospital ships these models shift the mode of operation. By adapting the drone floatplane, destroyer, drone-copter to the new realities of environmental degradation scenarios, I attempt to create something that proposes productive uses for technology. Before their realization as photograms these plastic models were thought to perform different operations, including: seed-bombing, geological surveys, or cleaning the Pacific gyre.
With reference to the daguerreotype, photographer Allan Sekula has pointed out that, “Photography is haunted by not one, but two “chattering ghosts,” the spectre of bourgeois science and the spectre of bourgeois art.”[1] It is these subjects of categorization that I am addressing through the antecedent processes explored in the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins or the mechanical depictions of Man Ray’s Rayograms or Moholy Nagy’s photogram work. There is the same impulse of tapping into a social imaginary of pervasive ideologies by way of categories. With Atkins it was the cataloging of the specimen, with Nagy and Ray it became a way to express the freedom offered by new materials and the processes of mechanization. When I am working on these images I am conjuring military X-rayed “specimens” and the detritus of our present surge of petrol-chemical production.
[1] Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal., spring 1981, pp. 15–16.
In these works the ghost-like spectral force of the image is emphasized in two ways, the first deals with the unrealized aspect of repurpousing military technologies for real future ecological needs the second is the fossilized trace of outdated modes of thinking. In this case militarism as such may be equated with a failure to consider the wider sphere of biological life.
The initial plastic models were constructed to mimic the process of using repurposed military technologies to heal damaged parts of the environment. Just as Spitfires and other planes were used after WW2 as crop dusters or civilian ocean liners became hospital ships these models shift the mode of operation. By adapting the drone floatplane, destroyer, drone-copter to the new realities of environmental degradation scenarios, I attempt to create something that proposes productive uses for technology. Before their realization as photograms these plastic models were thought to perform different operations, including: seed-bombing, geological surveys, or cleaning the Pacific gyre.
With reference to the daguerreotype, photographer Allan Sekula has pointed out that, “Photography is haunted by not one, but two “chattering ghosts,” the spectre of bourgeois science and the spectre of bourgeois art.”[1] It is these subjects of categorization that I am addressing through the antecedent processes explored in the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins or the mechanical depictions of Man Ray’s Rayograms or Moholy Nagy’s photogram work. There is the same impulse of tapping into a social imaginary of pervasive ideologies by way of categories. With Atkins it was the cataloging of the specimen, with Nagy and Ray it became a way to express the freedom offered by new materials and the processes of mechanization. When I am working on these images I am conjuring military X-rayed “specimens” and the detritus of our present surge of petrol-chemical production.
[1] Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal., spring 1981, pp. 15–16.
