deankessmann

Meandering with Purpose

archival pigment prints, various sizes, 2018–ongoing
edition 1/1 with 1AP at 5 different sizes

archival pigment prints
various sizes, 2018–ongoing
edition 1/1 with 1AP at 5 different sizes

Read a short description of this project

Meandering with Purpose

The landscape has been a recurring subject in my work since I began working as an artist, so this work is a return to a familiar place. Recently, when talking to colleagues and students about ways to move one’s artistic practice forward, I found myself reminiscing about missing the freedom that I felt as a young artist: the luxury of taking the time to wander with the sole purpose of being open to any and all situations that one might intentionally or inadvertently happen upon. Therefore, after spending many years exploring other ways of working and engaging with different types of content, I decided to move ahead by circling back to what propelled me to make photographs in the first place. The title of my most recent series and the overarching theme of this statement, Meandering with Purpose, is a contradiction of terms and the resulting work is a hodgepodge of imagery that may or may not ever coalesce into a singular and discrete project, which is fine with me. Freeing myself to work in this way has and will continue to result in side projects, like the group of images in Concrete Photographs, as well as opening up my thinking in ways that will push me in new directions. Like most of my practice, making these images is a journey through the space that exists between photographs that function as objective records and those that are elusive and dissolve into nebulousness. While each image may fall at a specific point along the continuum between these two extremes, what remains consistent across all of them is their dependence upon the specificity of place. In this case, the place is Washington, DC. As I look back over my past projects, my hope is that by returning to an earlier approach to image making I will be able to strengthen a body of work that continues to question the boundaries of, and identifies new relationships between, representation and abstraction in photography.