Night Vision

Night Vision – Sign

Night Vision – Steps

Night Vision – Trees

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Dark and Brutal

‘Unlike fright, which is characterised by the surprise of a sudden presence of danger, and dread, which is always directed towards a specific object, the nature of fear is ‘to be non-specific and to have no object.’ … By being ‘non-specific’, fear instead accounts for both expectation and the emergent sense of anxiety.’ – Caterina Albano: ‘Fear and Art in the Contemporary World.’

‘Fear represents a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, and preparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the danger may well be unknown.’ – Freud (1920): ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’

‘Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture which flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement. Examples are typically very linear, fortresslike and blockish, often with a predominance of concrete construction. Initially the style came about for government buildings, low-rent housing and shopping centers to create functional structures at a low cost, but eventually designers adopted the look for other uses such as college buildings. Critics of the style find it unappealing due to its “cold” appearance, projecting an atmosphere of totalitarianism, as well as the association of the buildings with urban decay due to materials weathering poorly in certain climates and the surfaces being prone to vandalism by graffiti.’  –  Wikipedia

‘Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.’ – Theodore Dalrymple: ‘The Architect as Totlitarian’

                                Le Corbusier’s design for ‘The RadiantCity’

Illuminated Space – Sublime Series

‘The disproportion between the human body and the vastness of space that traditionally evoked a sense of the gigantic …. the Sublime invokes loss, silence and absence … The tension between space and place is inherent to contemporary disorientation, is critically situated in the hyperspace of late modernity … the ‘non-places’ of today’s urbanisation.’

Caterina Albano: ‘Fear and Art in The Contemporary World’

This series of images relocates Edmund Burkes concept of the Sublime, epitomised by Casper David Friedrich’s landscape paintings, to subterranean urban spaces – where the sense of awe wrapped up in fear becomes an internal experience. Fear is evoked by disorientation and dislocation, unspecified locations – man-made functional structure replaces natural formation blurring the distinctions between place and non-place. This is a suppressed sense of the Sublime; unlike war reportage, images of natural disaster or epic landscpae. However, there is history and drama here too: the history of association. Are these cavernous spaces technological labs or war-related ruins? An overriding sense of agoraphobia and anxiety also pervades these spaces: the lure of the unknown, the lair of the beast. There is a simultaneous psychological imploding and exploding,  a vertiginous oscillation, one could say, leading to a schizoid sense of self.

Experimental Space

  Bunker

Experimental Space refers to interior spaces where the purpose of the room (a bunker?) is ambiguous. These photographs do not aim to describe nor explain a space but, like Rothkos late multiform paintings, to suggest a psychological state of mind. Limiting the composition to simple blocks and partial views restricts the understanding of the space. The viewer is then left with a feeling of dislocation and forced to read into the image, to seek understanding beyond the limited frame of the image.

 

The Rings of Saturn

  Silo

‘From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with stones … looked .. like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for the purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas, which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more the notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe.’   – W.G.Sebald: ‘The Rings of Saturn’

 

Suite Nocturn

  Arch with Reflection

‘Incidental music is often background music and adds atmosphere to the action. It may take the form of something as simple as a low, ominous tone suggesting an impending startling event or to enhance the depiction of a story-advancing sequence. It may also include pieces such as overtures, music played during scene changes, or at the end of an act, immediately preceding an interlude, as was customary with several nineteenth-century plays.’    – Wikipedia

Nocturnal Spaces, like incidental music, fill the background space of the conscious mind. Wandering through the nightscape the landscape changes radically, no longer informed by  lines delineated by daylight, contours merge into vastly different realms, ones where subconscious thoughts leak out into nocturnal spaces.

Elegiac Series

  Descent