As Things Decay They Bring Their Equivalents into Being

These images come from a recent project, made in 2013, now a commissioned artist book, Indigo, published by Conveyor Arts as part of their Visible Spectrum series. Indigo originates with the myth of Sir Isaac Newton’s placing of the color “indigo” into the visible spectrum to ward off the demons of his superstition – the supremacy of seven over six. Newton was also an alchemist, and my work attempts a kind of alchemy, the transformation of everyday objects into sculpture, the calling out of shapes that exist, almost invisibly, in the landscape, studio, and in the shadows. Through the use of multiple exposures, between which objects in the frame are masked out, I am creating scenes from my own subconscious. The work owes as much to Dario Argento and 1970s Italian Giallo horror films as it does to Alfred Jarry and pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions. This work is borne out of my deepest psychology, emerging in a series of technical, in-camera experiments, which utilize using both my own techniques as well as 19th-century trick photography found in old manuals and texts. I am attempting to weave together technique and image in a philosophical journey that combines symbology, influence, and the history of art to create a personal set of mythologies about existence.