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"My photography explores contemporary
conceptions of nature, representation, and the role of the photograph in
our understanding of each, through the use of toys as my subject.
Plastic animals and Play-Doh captured using large format equipment and
printed on a grand scale, create dissonant and often ambiguous images
that allow diminutive and trivial objects to become monumental. By
manipulating focus, scale and color and by using subjects and materials
that are inherently ironic, I play with the tension photography creates
between a subject/object and its photographic representation. I am, in
effect, asking the viewer to consider how photographic vision shapes our
expectations of the actual, and the consequences this has on how we
imagine and engage the world. I want these images to function variously
as a celebration of the transformative possibilities of photography; as
a small rebellion against the persistence of, and our faith in, the
‘straight’ photograph; and finally as a means questioning not only of
how photography represents ‘what was before the lens’ but how it comes
to shape our very imagination of what ‘is’ and what is possible. The Freedom Toys are, by contrast, grimly ironic; relying not on 'photographic sight' in order to achieve their effect, but rather on the discordant tangibility, both physical and conceptual, that exists in their ‘realness.‘ These ‘toys’ concern the cultural conditions that enable the ‘horror’ we are so ‘shocked’ by, and the process by which, once made public’ we trivialize and diminish what we have seen (made.) These ‘toys’ exist as mock archetypes, each standing in its assigned place as part of the ephemeral spectacle of the American cultural experience. In doing so they explore the variety of veiled ways we encounter and ultimately trivialize to the point of caricature, war, politics and private tragedy." |
