The first thing that plaque brought to me was exile 2020
13 cm x 18 cm x 3 cm
Mixed media
How the application of other materials onto the photographic surface can extend the indexical trace of the photograph?, How communicates it to viewer beyond the depiction?
Today, ready-made objects and materials are added and combined with photographs in order to reveal how photography’s depictive and indexical qualities in their singularity are insufficient to tell a complete reality or story. Objects, materials and techniques might at once attack the visual qualities and narrative possibilities of photography but can also strengthen them. While in this work a high lever of narrativity is lost through the application of additive materials, it also gained a new form of communicability. Firstly, the choice of the use of cement in much of this work not only gives weight and dimensions to the seemingly flat photograph but also likewise strengthens the depicted subject substantively. The manipulated photograph displays an interplay between two realities. By submitting the photograph of airport landscape with cement, I not only translate the physical and tactile properties of the photographed landscapes in an image, but also take the physical materiality into the reality. Secondly, the transparent foil sealed the cement block, partly making the photographic surface opaque and rough. In this way the material, both literally and figuratively speaking, locks up the photograph. With this experimental intervention, I attempt compensating for the photographs failure to encompass the physical site it represents. On the one hand the photograph paper depicts the image. On the other hand, the mat cement and the opaque textures of transparent foil bring the heaviness and uncertainty of the same image to the here and now. Therewith that what is presented becomes a haptic experience - one that photography alone is insufficient for. 21/05/2020 Sunyoung Park