Celestial Navigation

What started as a response to a painting by Rebecca Salter at British Art Center, grew into a suite of pictures about the night sky. I am very interested in what happens when a photograph of ordinary, regular, every day stuff takes on a different meaning, looks different and even becomes something else: an image. In each of these grids, ranging from nine to one hundred cells, photographs of surfaces, sometimes objects, usually broad swatches of stuff, were combined to better define what I saw. One might argue that there is no need to take 100 pictures when a single picture should suffice. That is certainly true if the description of that specific 1/125th of a second is the goal. My take is that the longer involvement allows for serendipity and image to enter into the experience both mine and the viewers. These pictures are about an AHA! Moment. I would see some surface and look at it for a while intrigued when the roof or the chrysanthemums or the snow sort of tugged on my coat tail and said “Hey you, pay attention.” I found myself saying, “OK I get it. And got to work. I was dragged along by the work, sort of like being a water skier. How cool. These pictures are less about narrative, and less about time and more about the collective image created by the aggregate of the component parts. The image is that they are not what they seem to be.