I find myself running to and embracing an excessive amount of information whenever I begin any creative process. In the midst of what appears to be chaos, while struggling to retain too much, I freeze and withdraw. This behavior results in my need of removing or concealing information in order to slow down my impulses. If beauty is the subject then the ease to imitate, that which is beautiful, is simple. However, it is an effort to make that imitation unique and curious. What I forget each time I return to this process is that life's issues are simple -- variables continuously repeat themselves, sometimes appearing differently but their basis is the same.
Concealing information in the photographic image has left me with minimized shapes and lines that subtly divide, recede and smooth the plane of the while jeopardizing loss entirely. My pictures are muddy and occasionally unreadable, resulting from an interest in the way objects appeared within my peripheral vision. As I move through a space this oblique vision directs my reading as much as what is immediately before me. The environment is made seductive by those objects that can not be easily seen. As such, they stand for the secret and inaccessible. My mind grasps for a tentative understanding. And it's the enchantment with things that by nature are obscure that follows from both my terror of and desire for this very obscurity. A normal cone of vision consists of a viewing area referred to as lines of sight. It has been my intention to quiet the chaos of unwanted information by narrowing this degree of vision. While I fear losing that which is tangible, I am seduced by the displacement of reality. Or at the least, I am seduced by entering a reality that is simplified in its viewpoint. The subtlety of change in a space is what pulls me into the subject. Nearing the completion of almost every series I realize that my original intent of excluding information in order to 'quiet the chaos' is flawed. While I have eliminated reality from most of the pictures there is still an incredible amount of content. And through this process I have learned that circumstances always exist and that an empty space is not void of information but more acute.
In searching for a definition of the word 'pleasure' I found another definition which gave me insight to my social experience --"pleasure principle n. (1912): a tendency for individual behavior to be directed toward immediate satisfaction of instinctual drives and immediate relief from pain or discomfort."1 What has become clear to me, after viewing the images as a collection, is that which gives me pleasure is equal to eye candy and can be pretty. I hope that there exits some thread of logic between my photographic series. I keep returning to the ideas of eliminating or concealing information, I believe, for the sake of slowing down interaction. Eliminating "the ends of the scale reserved for incisive duty" 2 reassures my attraction to mud and perpetuates the desire of losing information completely. The subtle values of gray, gradations of light, placement of lines and isolation of colors are all attempts at solving one reoccurring idea-emptying space of anything unnecessary.
1. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary - 10th ed.
2. Henry Rankin Poore, Pictorial Composition, 1903, p. 104
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