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matter unmasked
In these
photographic collages everyday, familiar images are transformed
into compositions that hint at invisible, underlying structures.
Individual
photographs have been fractured and reassembled to symbolize the
building blocks of matter. Integrating these photographic shards
with intact images has created recognizable but dynamically
altered scenes.
It is as if
surfaces have been stripped away to expose
what is underneath: configurations
suggestive of fundamental molecular structures or the frenetic
motion at the subatomic level.
Kathryn Dunlevie
August 2007
more than
meets the eye
Inspired by a space,
I photograph it segment by segment from various vantage points.
Next, I arrange and rearrange the images until a coherent composition
emerges. The result—a photographic equivalent of a Cubist
collage—is uneven, with visual jumps occurring wherever the
edges of two photos meet. Finally, I paint, blurring the borders
between photos and smoothing the abrupt shifts in perspective.
This knitting together
of the disjunctive parts seems to coax the space into giving up
its secrets. It is as if a plateau's sunken river bed were to
unfold and rise up into the viewer's line of sight, or as if a
"mirror-on-a-stick" spy-toy allowed a look straight ahead to reveal
details from outside the viewer's visual scan.
The interweaving of
various perspectives creates a space with twists and ripples,
revealing unexpected nooks and crannies and peeks around corners.
The initial photo-collage is transformed, through the act of painting,
into a pictorial space where weird transitions and subtle spatial
anomalies emerge.
The depiction of this
new space is not just a record of what we see while moving in
space over time, but includes elements that have appeared as if
from beyond the customary four dimensions. Amidst the reorganization
of the various perspectives, the viewer catches sight of details
not visible in the original space: details suggestive of the extra
dimensions posited in contemporary theoretical physics.
This new pictorial
space is not just a composite of things we see as we move through
space and time. It also offers glimpses of what may actually exist
around us that we do not see.
Kathryn Dunlevie
September 2004
not at first glance
Our media-saturated lives, punctuated by cell phones and computer screens, have forced us to develop a new type of perception.
The rapid connect/disconnect we experience both firsthand through our senses, and vicariously through news and entertainment,
creates a barrage of simultaneous and often conflicting flashes of data.
We have adapted to this overload by instantly
filtering out the extraneous and assembling the relevant into ad
hoc composites. In our visual sweep through the contemporary
world, we no longer perceive things as “still”, but as “caught”
in transit for that instant after they have registered and
before they are replaced. Innumerable stimuli demand our
attention and force us to step up our level of pattern
formation: choosing what to keep, what to discard and how to
make sense of what remains.
Integrating
photography and painting, my work is a visual rendering of the
structure of this new perception—not a linear catalogue, but a
synthesis of pertinent images extracted from the ceaseless
bombardment. The camera stands in for our eyes, recording random
hits of visual information. Selection and assembly of key images
function like the contemporary subconscious: editing and
organizing only the most significant elements into compositions
whose apparent harmony masks incongruities not obvious at first
glance.
Kathryn Dunlevie
September 2001
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