The Surface Of The World
The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, as we speak to our city . . . – Roland Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism” The Surface Of The World is a creative nod to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. In his work, Antonioni is well known for his use of modern architecture, its aesthetic composition, and its use of space. While the selection of photographs in the series doesn't attempt to reconstruct Antonioni's aesthetic, his vision informs them. The photographs are, in the modernist sense, found objects. They explore the silence inherent in modern urban space, and they reproduce in the viewer the perceptual disorientation evoked by contemporary life. The images abstract time and place while systematically deconstructing the urban environment. They exist as examples of how we as individuals choose to view the world around ourselves, or instead how we might decide to block from our perception the surface of the world. What follows are examples from a much larger project.
