juxtaposing signs

Core Samples 09 — Think back over works you have done over your lifetime. Add any strong impulses, things you always “wanted to do.” In considering the works that were unconcluded, what potential still exists in each? Chose an idea from your responses that still has some life in it. Let a piece come from reviving that idea.

Photography is the medium I use to capture what I experience. Space and place serve as my content to document what I see, and re-represent it. I am studying space and time as data to study multiplicity and multidimensionality. This semester I have worked on numerous short studies in trying to define these space/place inspirations. I have constructed several small books which utilize my photographs from the southwest. Signs, building materials, horizon landscapes—they all have influenced me.
These moments—random instances filtered through my interests and my perception— depend on what I happened to see. They now make up my subject matter. I gather information and frame it in new forms. I don’t set out with too specific goals. Yet, the photographs which I capture resonate with similarities.

Close up fragments decontextualized from their original surroundings—these isolated, blown up instances convey and capture the sense of place. As a hunter and gatherer, I do not seek out specific inspiration; I utilize materials which I come across, documenting and transcribing my journeys. The particular place is also almost incidental, as inspiration and source material can come out of anything. From Route 66, I photographed signs and billboards, graphic buildings in the flat landscape.

I like mixing and rearranging, constructing and intersecting. In my project I wanted to work with free association—pairing two things that did not necessarily go together. In this week’s studies, I overlapped letterpress letters on top of printouts of signs from the southwest. I began looking at signs as content, signs that took the place of buildings. The vernacular vocabulary of old Route 66 hotel signs proved to be inspirational. With their colors, overlaps, and woodcut forms the old signs acted as letter forms and as symbols of language. I got interested in the layering of the letterpress on top of the printed photographs to reveal and conceal the information underneath.