An enduring preoccupation in my work is finding a visual equivalent to evoke the richness of real experience where the wealth of details in space offers endless narrative possibilities over time. In Et in Arcadia Ego, a body of work extracted from Hippopotamus and Destiny and From a New World series, I am particularly interested in exploring the concepts of the ephemeral and the transient, the familiar and the strange, the obvious and the overlooked, the vain and the virtuous. These elaborate settings are constructed in the form of miniature maquettes, and then destroyed immediately after capturing them on film. The medium of photography is particularly empowering in this instance, allowing the recording and documentation of data. The camera captures the physicality of a moment, a space, an experience, which once existed to be fleetingly witnessed by us all but is now gone forever. In essence, this metaphor for a contemporary Arcadia, long before visited by the ancient Greeks, is a romantic and introspective view of the world that surrounds us or has yet to be discovered.
In Hippopotamus and Destiny Series, the rich and complex narrative revolves around the hippopotamus journey a journey to find a long lost abode. However, each time the “home” is found, it gets abandoned again. As finding and leaving goes on moving on becomes the eternal destination. In contrast to the perpetual movement and fluidity evoked of this series, From a New World Series explores the static and staged world of the still-life paintings of the seventeenth century Dutch and Spanish masters. Expanding on the trend of the XVI-XVII century painting, and featuring exotic subjects in their own narratives, my purpose was to document artefacts collected from a yet undiscovered world. Concentrating on more graphic factors of composition and lightning to create a meaningful art object, the camera and the negative take precedent over the elaborate maquettes of the pervious series.
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