Reflection (2006-2008)

The eight images in the Reflection series layer simultaneous narratives of different times and places. Attracted to the “world within a world” quality of reflections in pooled water, I photographed reflected houses, trees and streets, appearing upside-down as they emerge from the flat plane of snow or pavement surrounding the puddle. The upside-down reflections of the neighborhood transform a familiar reality with a sense of dislocation. To echo this feeling of disorientation, and to further accentuate the passage of time captured through the changing seasons in the images, I digitally inserted into each image one or more snapshots from several decades ago, also placed upside-down. This last gesture nudges the work further into abstraction as colours and textures function apart from the reality they represent. The old photographs are not seen in their entirety but, like fragments of memory, are glimpsed through the contemporary street images. The photographs of the water are focused on the depths of the reflections, while the shallow depth of field blurs the peripheral foreground, blending it into the soft grain of the old snapshots. Several sets of dualities intermingle in the work: The play between surface and depth in the images evokes a contemplative sense of looking into a different time and space, the present and past coexisting. The images oscillate between representation and painterly abstraction, while the intimate, private context of the family snapshot merges with the more public realm of landscape and street photography. Further, there is a dynamic tension between the photograph’s traditional role as documentation of the ‘real’ and the constructed nature of these images. In counterpoint to the minute-by-minute frantic pace of contemporary life, the work proposes a space of introspection and reflection on our individual place within a temporal and spatial continuum.

The images have been printed as inkjet prints on photographic paper, and also as transparencies in light boxes. As light boxes they can be exhibited together with the related video projection, Flow, both the still and moving media emanating light in an otherwise dark space to dramatic effect.