Ambiguous Landscapes

Ambiguous Landscapes comprises large-scale ‘dislocated’ photographic diptychs and a wall-mounted video installation of framed LCD monitors. In these works, both natural and man-made landscapes — a sage-brush covered hillside; a grass field; a paved dyke; a granite stair; and a snowy slope — are rendered unfamiliar and spatially ambiguous with the camera.

This work draws attention to the illusory quality of perspectival space through a focus on the optical limitations of the camera in depicting three-dimensional space. Landscape is often understood through our inhabitation of it — actual or imagined. In Ambiguous Landscapes, it is the presence of a human figure moving over and through the terrain that reveals its shape and scale, making it comprehensible and recognisable. The figure registers and describes space and time, altering our perception of the depicted landscape — from a flat colour field image to three-dimensional space.

Both the photographs and the video are intended to engender a contemplative experience that draws attention to temporality by making it an integral component of the work. In the photographic pairs this is achieved through the separation of the two images — almost identical except for the presence of the figure in one — so that there is a temporal gap between the encounter of each as the viewer moves through the exhibition space.

In the videos it is the occasional movement of the figure traversing an otherwise empty and still landscape that reveals the shape of its topography, as well as its expanse. These moving images are endlessly repeating, looped with a built-in randomness that produces moments when the same landscape appears at different points in time across multiple screens. The videos are nevertheless largely still, setting up a situation of waiting and expectation.