I am currently exploring new possibilities in photographic image-making through the use of both analogue and digital processes. I first employ cameraless techniques in which I assault 4×5 light-sensitive, black and white sheet film with unconventional chemicals, materials and light, in order to generate richly detailed and textural abstract images. These aleatory techniques produce impermanent, non-archival negatives that I then preserve through high-resolution digital scanning.
The work titled Photo Objects is a generative iteration of these subversive engagements and it constitutes a rethinking of the nature of photography. In this work I print my digital scans onto large-scale transparency film and then each piece of film is further enhanced with mirror paint, and is then layered, bent, folded, hung, curled, twisted, taped and glued to make them sculptural.
What began as an investigation into material and chance operation has now become, for me, a series of photographic objects that document my performative experiences with the materials; that operate as artifacts of analogue photographic processes; and that blur the lines between sculpture and photography, thus challenging what the medium can be.
This is an installation photograph of the first exhibition of Photo Objects at the Boarding House Gallery in May 2017.
