2012 Note on Mimetic skin: the smartphone pictures.
The images in this installation of photography are ‘mimetic skin’.
That is, they are thin slivers of reality incised off the visual field like skin from a living organism. They are a captured surface with a knowledge supply and living content under it. The images around this installation lift mimetic skin and document culture intuitively in material and natural space. What substrata that is under the skin of these images is an affect for the absurd, the banal, the ironical in material detritus of the everyday. With the ubiquity of the smartphone camera technology, I render humanity oblique and cursory to capture subjectively what we leave behind.
The philosophy of photography is compelling in the question: what is in the photographic image that exists as reality? The imaging tools, chemical composition of the paper, inks and the hardware that go to make an image technically, renders a photograph real as an object. You can physically tear it, cut it, burn it, frame it, erase it, and digitally delete or deliver it in all its reproductive outcomes, although at the end of those deliveries we are still left with an ‘image’. Like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat with nothing left but a smile.
All photographic images draw me into the phenomenon of the ‘image’ immanent and compelling.