Statement
My work addresses the mysterious and confusing parts of human life – wonder and ambiguity, familiarity and strangeness, imagination and fear, the slipperiness of time and space, light and dark. I look for moments that combine surprise and recognition in a flash of light, shadow, reflection, color, line, or shape within the overlooked, ephemeral and ordinary. I am interested in visual confusion, tricks of light and mirage, and the aura that can suddenly surround everyday objects, places, and spaces. I am seeking the charge of things - hidden and revealed, real and imagined.
Sometimes even when we have words, they are inadequate, or seem inaccessible. Yet experiences that can’t be described can still have resonance, affect. They may touch, move, or infect; they may manifest a feeling, disposition or tendency. I make images to access that space where my knowledge and language fail.
Phenomenophilia is looking away at the colored shadow on the wall, or keeping the head turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view... We can't believe ourselves entitled to this feeling about a perceptual object so ephemeral that we can't even imagine that someone else would see it as we do, or even see it at all... something that could be coming to be and does not yet have the liabilities of anything that is.
Rei Terada, Looking Away
Sometimes even when we have words, they are inadequate, or seem inaccessible. Yet experiences that can’t be described can still have resonance, affect. They may touch, move, or infect; they may manifest a feeling, disposition or tendency. I make images to access that space where my knowledge and language fail.
Phenomenophilia is looking away at the colored shadow on the wall, or keeping the head turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view... We can't believe ourselves entitled to this feeling about a perceptual object so ephemeral that we can't even imagine that someone else would see it as we do, or even see it at all... something that could be coming to be and does not yet have the liabilities of anything that is.
Rei Terada, Looking Away