deankessmann

Where the Ceiling Meets the Wall: An Extended Horizon

pigment prints, 31 ½ x 21 inches (image), 33 ½ x 23 inches (paper), 2015
edition 1/1 with 1 AP

pigment prints
31 ½ x 21 inches (image) 33 ½ x 23 inches (paper), 2015
edition 1/1 with 1 AP

Read a short description of this project

Where the Ceiling Meets the Wall: An Extended Horizon

This project continues an ongoing exploration of interior architectural spaces, which have utilized a variety of artistic interventions and visual transformations. At its most basic level, this most recent project is a series of vertically oriented, nearly identical, abstract images that are equally divided into an upper and lower half. By framing the subject in this way the three-dimensional space becomes a pair of stacked, seemingly two-dimensional rectangles, which allude to the basic, three-dimensional building blocks of another art form, architecture. However, these repeating horizontal dividing lines that divide these images are more than compositional elements to tie the individual pieces together; these lines are the points where each of the walls that have been photographed intersect with the ceiling. My primary objective with this project was to enter into a discourse around perceptions of interior architectural spaces and the ways in which we experience them on a phenomenological level. Given that the images in this series consists of straightforward photographs of areas in my home where the ceiling literally meets the wall, they are matter-of-fact documents of the place where I live; yet, on a more poetic level, like my practice as a whole, they are an artistic and philosophical meditation on an ordinary subject, in this case, photographs of the walls and ceilings of normal rooms that reveal an intimate familiarity with a specific place at a particular moment in time. While at first glance the prints in Where the Ceiling Meets the Wall: An Extended Horizon may seem to be blank, detail-less abstractions, each of the final prints is a photographic document that contains unique visual data, albeit of surfaces that often go unnoticed and are more alike than they are different; abstractions that slowly dissolve into representations and back again.