This piece is intended to engage with memory; specifically, it represents the space of cultural memory, the objects and characters that populate it. It alludes to the abstract but inevitable interrelationships between these cultural artifacts through its sequencing. It is a simple reorganization of existing data, an act of appropriation designed to destabilize the familiar. To this same end, I created a series of amassed objects captured photogrammetrically and rendered as geometric abstractions. The large format, inkjet prints depict assemblages of objects in various states of storage. They are meant to function as a phenomenological critique, emphasizing the distinction between objecthood and ideological content. The distortion of the hard, geometric contours, the visible polygons that make up the three-dimensional mesh under the photographic surface texture, lend the images a kind of digital impasto intended to clarify their computational origin, and promote the subject’s status as malleable data. Console with Flowers depicts an assemblage of flowers, media, and assorted household objects. The flowers have been placed into a large plastic cup from a fried chicken restaurant, next to a row of video game cases from which a similar, floral form is emanating. The rhyme between these blooming forms underscores an equivalence between the real and the simulated that resonates throughout the project, as well as engaging with traditional forms of still life. A ruler on the table implies spatial verisimilitude, while an alarm clock facing away from the viewer indicates the scan exists outside of measurable time. The media objects function as cultural signifiers, as well as addressing the crucial distinction between physical objects and the information they represent, a distinction we embody as conscious, physical beings. A similar strategy is used in Materials 1. A darkened storage area illuminated by flashlight is represented as a fractured, geometric abstraction. Kept in a basement storage area, the depicted mass of objects (trophies, children’s toys, an old bicycle) has been preserved largely for its sentimental value. In that sense they are signifiers more than objects, representative of ideological rather than physical content. Both visually and conceptually they are rendered virtual, in order to critically engage with our propensity to conflate the object and the idea. Likewise, there is a correlation between physical and digital storage proposed by the image. Both projects serve as ways to juxtapose our domestic and popular culture, the stuff of daily life, with the universal objectivity of mathematics, the visual language through which they are represented. I use computational photography to provide this virtual, geometric vision of the physical world in order to encourage a critique of biological thinking. In that sense, these works are designed to provoke the sense that our relationship to the real, while apparently familiar, is a contingent, illusory construction.
MATERIALS 1