Submission Sappington, John

Over the past 4 years, I have devoted my lens to an exploration of culturally and historically meaningful locations on Oahu, Hawaii. The sequence from this series, Chinatown, mid-week market 2019, represents an incredibly historically rich and vibrant neighborhood in the history of the island of Oahu and its communities. The complexity of historical and contemporary activity within this neighborhood create equally complex cross cultural visual and aesthetic experiences within the photographs. The overlapping cultural symbolism, historical memory, signage, action and activity form a cross cultural montage of meaning. Creating images which interrogate the historical, cultural, conceptual, aesthetic and even personal meaning of the environments is the underlying focus of my creative practice. The specificity that these sites elicit through time, place, point of view make for a complex network of meaningful relationships between my self, the viewer and the site. This is an ongoing and underlying reading of spaces in time.