Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 1

Whenever I'm directly asked a question, I feel caught off guard. I begin to run through the long list of things that I'd been thinking of, from carpet patterns to a classmate's expression to whatever existential crisis had been plaguing me that week. After a good 30 seconds of consideration, I still find myself unsure of which thought could be translated into the appropriate verbal response for the question at hand. At times, I even forget the question I'd been asked in the first place.

Living in my own head doesn't help me create a cohesive artist talk, it seems. So, I've decided to use this blog as a place to brainstorm for my upcoming show. A stream of consciousness free write, but directed towards my architectural photographs.

Currently, here are the photographs I'm going to include in my thesis show:

(For the record, I hope to re-shoot the second to bottom some time this week, so long as the weather cooperates and delivers me an overcast day without precipitation.)

The first thing that jumps out at me when I look at this series is the white space. I remember one art class when my professor showed me a teddy bear and told me not to draw the bear, but to draw the space around it. It's easy to draw what we know, what we expect; if asked to draw a teddy bear, most people would revert to symbol drawing. But, when I was told to focus on a component that I had once not even considered, I began to see the bear differently.

The same is true with these images. When first presented with them, I see white space contrasted with blacks and greys. These white spaces attract me and force me to recognize patterns composed of clouded skies, or more eloquently put, of the absence of constructed space.

The negative space is especially evident because I use distorted angles, the likes of which were trademarks of New Vision photography (Maholy Nagy, Lucien Herve). In abstracting the buildings I choose to photograph, I force the viewer to look at my images as a collection of lines, shapes, forms, textures, tones, highlights, shadows, and geometric relationships. I photograph the way I see the world; often at weird angles, completely apart from preconceived notions, and always new and exciting. At this point, I'm still unsure if the focus is giving architecture a new lens or whether I'm really all gung ho about negative space. What would it mean to photograph the absence of something? (I should look this up tomorrow, maybe not at 3am).

Also, at this point I want to talk about the potentials of a video installation in my show. I have yet to test out my works with projectors (though I have looked into it online and also done tests with photoshop ), but I'm pretty sure my idea of overlapping two images at a time will work. When viewing the projected piece, neither of the two photographs being displayed will be fully apparent; the overlapping images will abstract the image even further, and thereby make the specific details of the buildings even more pronounced. I guess the images on the walls will be like the first step in this show and the video the second; the projection will display the highest point at which architecture can be abstracted while still making the details of the buildings apparent.