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.

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Kathryn Dunlevie

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