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matter unmasked:
In these photographic collages everyday, familiar images are transformed into compositions that hint at invisible, underlying structures.
Individual photographs have been fractured and reassembled to symbolize the building blocks of matter. Integrating these photographic shards with intact images has created recognizable but dynamically altered scenes.
It is as if surfaces have been stripped away to expose what is underneath: configurations suggestive of fundamental molecular structures or the frenetic motion at the subatomic level.
Kathryn Dunlevie
August 2007
more than meets the eye:
Inspired by a space, I photograph it segment by segment from various vantage points. Next, I arrange and rearrange the images until a coherent composition emerges. The result—a photographic equivalent of a Cubist collage—is uneven, with visual jumps occurring wherever the edges of two photos meet. Finally, I paint, blurring the borders between photos and smoothing the abrupt shifts in perspective.
This knitting together of the disjunctive parts seems to coax the space into giving up its secrets. It is as if a plateau's sunken river bed were to unfold and rise up into the viewer's line of sight, or as if a "mirror-on-a-stick" spy-toy allowed a look straight ahead to reveal details from outside the viewer's visual scan.
The interweaving of various perspectives creates a space with twists and ripples, revealing unexpected nooks and crannies and peeks around corners. The initial photo-collage is transformed, through the act of painting, into a pictorial space where weird transitions and subtle spatial anomalies emerge.
The depiction of this new space is not just a record of what we see while moving in space over time, but includes elements that have appeared as if from beyond the customary four dimensions. Amidst the reorganization of the various perspectives, the viewer catches sight of details not visible in the original space: details suggestive of the extra dimensions posited in contemporary theoretical physics.
This new pictorial space is not just a composite of things we see as we move through space and time. It also offers glimpses of what may actually exist around us that we do not see.
Kathryn Dunlevie
September 2004
not at first glance:
Our media-saturated lives, punctuated by cell phones and computer screens, have forced us to develop a new type of perception. The rapid connect/disconnect we experience both firsthand through our senses, and vicariously through news and entertainment, creates a barrage of simultaneous and often conflicting flashes of data.
We have adapted to this overload by instantly filtering out the extraneous and assembling the relevant into ad hoc composites. In our visual sweep through the contemporary world, we no longer perceive things as “still”, but as “caught” in transit for that instant after they have registered and before they are replaced. Innumerable stimuli demand our attention and force us to step up our level of pattern formation: choosing what to keep, what to discard and how to make sense of what remains.
Integrating photography and painting, my work is a visual rendering of the structure of this new perception—not a linear catalogue, but a synthesis of pertinent images extracted from the ceaseless bombardment. The camera stands in for our eyes, recording random hits of visual information. Selection and assembly of key images function like the contemporary subconscious: editing and organizing only the most significant elements into compositions whose apparent harmony masks incongruities not obvious at first glance.
Kathryn Dunlevie
September 2001
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