Fishing Creek
.
⊥
⊥
⊥
⊥
⊥
⊥
STATEMENT
These drawings are all based on a single photograph and are part of a larger project investigating this one image of this one location at this precise moment through drawings, video and virtual reality simulations.
My desire to make this work began with a photograph I took– a rather mundane and off-balance picture of a river– that, for whatever reason, captivated me. It also stemmed from my interest in Landscape and its function in contemporary art. Historically, landscape has operated in various ways: as backdrop in classical religious, allegorical or portrait painting; as representation of the Sublime in German and American Romanticism; as reaction against industrialization in other romanticisms; as vehicle for documentation, pictorialism or conservationism in early black and white photography; and as memento in vacation snapshots. But what does it mean to make a picture of the landscape today? And what does it mean to make a reproduction of a photograph of a landscape?
With those questions in mind, I began to reproduce the same picture in multiple. Though identical in imagery, each drawing has its own mood, visual properties and qualities of the hand. Individually, each one is a fairly innocuous copy of a banal photo. However, as a group they have an odd relationship; perhaps on some level they evoke a feeling of the Uncanny.
For me, the work raises questions about modes of production and reproduction in the studio, of the artistic “branding” that comes with working in a series or a style, and of the privileging of one image over any other by simply remaking it. Ultimately the question that resonates with me the most is this: What is the point of making another picture at all, regardless of its genre, to add to the endless pool of images in the world? Of course, as an artist and a picture-maker, I continue to return to the studio with the hope that, through the very act of making pictures, some kind of response will emerge.