Surrealist Sublime
My body of work has been influenced by abstract surrealist painters. They cross realism and abstraction to produce works that exhibit raw emotion. My process for this work creates an alternate perception of reality through activated still life. The large format photographs I have created emulate surrealist paintings. By choosing to print the images on a fine matte paper, with a bleeding edge, the work is not confined within a frame. My goal was to capture the ephemeral qualities that come with shooting in water so I can transform it into a new space. Ethereal spaces were created by lining a fish tank with chiffon fabrics, which creates organic lines and shapes. To achieve painterly qualities, I adding acrylic paints and mixed them with various solvents. The surface of the water creates reflections in the glass of the fish tank. Forms that are created by these reflections shift the space into a multidimensional place. Underwater spaces destabilize our understanding of reality and our surroundings. When looking at the images there is a sense of a grounded space but then as your eye moves throughout the image the space gets distorted. This reminds us at the microcosmic level of how the universe is always expanding, shifting, and evolving.
