Aerial Photograph, Single Edition 1/1, 8256 x 6192, JPG
Born out of a curiosity about perspective and scale, this three volume photo series is a study, a tone poem, and a geological survey of texture and perception. It challenges the eye, and further questions the validity of horizon lines and angles to subvert what we’re used to seeing. In turn, Skymunk - Perceptions of Scale takes something that is perhaps familiar and dramatic, the awe inspiring character of nature’s architecture, and taunts the viewer with it, inviting them to experience it differently.
Through aerial photography the macro can seem micro, and the micro can be understood or held with a new kind of reverence. At once there is the sensation of the thoroughly divine, purposeful, and then what can only be described as the completely strange offspring of chance.
What emerges is the landscape’s own sense of style and patterning. The necessities that dare it to survive, to thrive, to transform and adapt. On hand in each image is the undeniable and unchallenged power of nature as well as its vulnerability, and in that moment we perhaps begin to understand our own vulnerability and empowerments.
The edges, undulations, the crevasses and ravines, the tributaries can, in one regard be held as an organic artful expression of time and movement. Erosion becomes a sculptor’s hand, a dawn becomes a painter’s box, the shadows and the highlights become a storyteller’s words.
As the photographer himself manipulates scale he is in turn questioning perception, positing that it is all an illusion and at the same time celebrating and falling into the embrace of the misconception of magnitude, the misperception of depth, until there is the most peaceful and serene kind of delusion. Is this a silty-fingered spillway or the creeping cracks of someone’s palm? Are those clusters of clouds reflected in a glacial pool or hunks of floating ice, is it all moving rapidly, or does it possess the stillness of aged stone? Within the rhythm of these questions and curiosities we begin to see that at play here is not strictly a dazzling photographic series, but a symphony composed out of nature’s most violent, vibrant, convivial, and remarkable instrumentation.
