Sustenance
The 15 prints examine familiarity and strangeness, belonging vs. non-belonging, routine and repetition within the domestic environment. Here, various species of birds, and other creatures, coming to feed at the apartment balcony of my former home in Framingham became the subject of exploration with their activities documented using a large-format camera.
Birds have long been a symbolic motif of duality; of push-pull forces. They speak of home and migration at a time when I was living abroad, within my home, but not at home. Hence what could pass for an ordinary scene, appeared extraordinary to me.
The images are not typical avian pictures, as the birds do not dominate the frame to the exclusion of all else. Each large-size, textured Iris print is an exaggerated impression of reality, a hyper-reality, rather than a fabrication of it. Formal devices such as artificial lighting as well as the selective use of focus and magnification create a slippage between the perception of what is natural or manufactured. Colour and the close approximation of the works to human scale too, seduce viewers into the frame.
The dioramic quality of this series is also intentional. Created by institutions to educate the viewer “about the world around us,” the diorama served in many ways as a resurrection and a distillation of time. Photographs, likewise, prolong a moment or event that has passed. In this case, fleeting instances have been “captured” and, by this very process, made prominent and demanding of attention.
In the images, issues of hierarchy and identification become apparent between and within species. It is difficult to resist projecting human behaviours and characteristics onto these creatures. For example, ornithological texts state that cardinals mate for life, does this mean that the male and female cardinal that visit the feeders are a couple, that in the human sense, care for each other and partake in heterosexual monogamy?
A primary impetus for this work has been the act of looking over a sustained period of time. In fact, temporality is alluded to in a number of ways, from the cyclical changes in the seasons depicting the deadness of Winter or the renewal of Spring, to the subtle differences in the environment such as the levels of birdseed. The presentation of a group of images also speaks about a relationship to time and suggests that revelatory experiences, both subtle and dramatic, are rewarded through obsessive concentration on a task.
Medium:
Iris print on Somerset Velvet paper.
Dimensions:
Full Size – 47 x 35 inches
Half Size – 35 x 24 inches
Quarter Size – 24 x 18 inches
Edition Sizes:
Full Size – 15 (except for Sustenance 46 with an edition size of 20)
Half size – 25.
Quarter size – 25.