Landscape Permutations (2011)

This series is a part of my ongoing examination of how spaces and places are experienced, remembered, and represented. Each work is an imaginative recombination of images made between 2008-2010 of specific sites within my hometown, Red Deer, Alberta. The series compares the naturalistic quality of the photograph-as-archive with non-physical archives (e.g. dreams and memories) as repositories for remembered places. Each work represents the fragmented spaces and places from dreams and memories of old haunts and homes. The causal nature of the photograph is subverted in each work, whereby a new, imaginary space is created within real places. 

I am also very much interested in the representational capacity of photographs, and am motivated by questions such as: in what ways is a photograph a transparent view of the world (i.e. akin to looking through a pair of binoculars)? In what ways and to what degree does a photograph truthfully depict reality, and how is this influenced by the naturalistic qualities of photography? Despite the causal origin of a photograph, can a photograph become a more truthful depiction of a particular place? 

To examine some of these questions, I employed C.S. Peirce's theory of signs in the production of this series. The meaning or translation of a Peircean sign (i.e. the interpretant) is capable of infinite regression and progression, whereby the meaning is subject to change due to cultural influences and an individual's situated knowledge. In each work of this series, I have brought together separate components of two images, each with a unique interpretant, and forced them to share a single, new meaning. Despite an apparent loss of information within the larger frame of each work, the resulting composite image contains novel, endemic meaning which transcends either image used in its creation.