Cameras
‘Cameras’ are fun and fanciful visual records of my mediated hand in playful attempt after playful attempt to transform space, color, and line. Digital technology and software, specifically Photoshop, allows me to create ‘photographic’ images and prints while ‘drawing’ or ‘painting’ directly over photos of cameras culled from the Internet. My goal is to produce a ‘photograph’ (or the likes of a modern photograph) that bares the distinctive mark of my hand without actually using a camera. Thus the straightforward (but hopefully somewhat comedic) irony – these are photo-like images made without using the very thing pictured: a camera.
The overall form of the camera is abstracted and pared down to its basic shapes and lines – that of a box (cube) and a lens (cylinder). The camera’s structure allows me to address the fundamental task of depicting three-dimensional space, or in this case, a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface.
Any two-dimensional image depicting three-dimensional space is an illusion. ‘Cameras’ does not depict space traditionally – the pieces continually challenge the illusion of three-dimensions. Colors vibrate between background and foreground; quality of line falls in and out of focus; space collapses and then reconstitutes, oscillating between three and two dimensions; the eye dances.
