The Journey Series: meditations on perception and memory

This series explores how we perceive and recall our journeys, whether those journeys are through space and time or calling upon memories and the imagination.  As such the works are a form of documentation and recollection.

They can be seen as visual diaries of transitions…meditations on movement, perception and the instability of memory.

We perceive the world as a series of fleeting events, a sequence of dissolving and emerging memories. We conjure up those memories by calling upon discreet moments, serial events in time and space.  Here, the boundaries of these events dissolve and reform, shift and overlap, distort and rupture in a fractured montage. The emerging discontinuity reminds us that no journey, physical or mental, is experienced with continuity.  What we recall from our travels is not seamless but rather a flickering procession of impressions, some partial, some blurred, and some contradictory as clarity dissolves into motion and time folds upon itself.

Like memory however, these are always incomplete records and call to be understood as animated and every changing.

Many of the images are in a black and white/grey scale format which denies the viewer of the comfort provided by a rendition in “natural” color.  As a result, distraction is stripped away, and the image becomes focused on the rhythms of form and light leaving only the essential emotional resonance of the scene and of the memory.

Some of the works are triptychs, where the divisions between the panels serve as “temporal cuts”, giving the composition a cinematic feel, as in the passage of frames in a movie…each image panel becoming an extracted frame.

The width of the triptychs, and the process used to arrive at the initial core images (panoramic capture), reinforces the sensation of lateral motion, and for the viewer the actuality of journeying, as if from the window of a moving train, is brought to the foreground. In the Train From Vienna to Prague group, journeying is reinforced by the presence of railroad tracks and repetitive identical images enhancing the relationship to motion and passing time. 

Most of the prints are small in scale, inviting and pulling the viewer in for closer inspection and involvement.  The substrate of glass emphasizes not only the viewing context as one from a removed, separated location, but also the fragility of memory.  The photograph itself is a window between present and past.  Equally there is a clear reference to historical processes of photography when it was more like magic and alchemy. 

The interplay between clarity and blur, between foveal and peripheral vision, reflects the mechanisms of seeing and perceiving.  In turn this suggests how speed, reflection and emotion can distort our perception and our memories. 

The first group in this series, From Vienna to Prague, explores a train journey and conjures up a life’s journey, chapter by chapter, memory by memory.

The works are printed using an archival pigment print process on two seperate substrate editions: MOAB Entrada 100% rag paper and on glass.