Absentia (photographs) – Artist Statement

“What exactly is it, this truth of art? What we have here is only the truth of the factitious [man-made]…”

-Antonio Negri, Letter to Gianmarco on the Abstract

At the completion of the Periculum project I was left with over six hundred 8 ½” x 11” sheets of inkjet paper offcuts that I discovered were not easily recyclable. These offcuts of endangered Canadian plant species became the basis of my new series of photographs of collages entitled Absentia, which refers to the phrase “death in absentia” used when a person is declared legally dead in the “absence” of their remains; not unlike when a species is declared extinct.

The series Absentia uses the documentary form of the fieldwork photograph. However, I conduct ‘virtual’ fieldwork in the realm of the Internet by appropriating other photographers’ images of plant species at risk in Canada. This plays with Berlin-based artist and writer Hito Steyerl’s “uncertainty principle of modern documentarism”, which focuses on the “intensity of the problem of truth” at this moment in time, and that “the significance of documentary form lies more in how they are organized than what they depict.” This formal re-arranging takes on “the artistic gesture of abstraction.”

When the offcut ink-jet sheets in the Absentia series are stacked, fragments of images from the previous pages are revealed. The images are layered, ‘composted’, and transformed into a re-arranged or decomposed abstract composition. For the most part, the layers are cast in random order and the final image takes on a biomorphic character where nature is abstracted into ‘new nature’ through the use of chance.

The photographed collages in the Absentia series teeter between abstraction* and collage. I layer one offcut image on top of another until a final image is determined. That image is then photographed, enlarged, and printed. During the collage phase of the process there is the physical evidence of “touch” found in the cut-lines created with a blade slicing into the paper. When the photographed collage is enlarged those cut-lines are made even more evident. However, the printed photograph flattens the texture of the incisions, in the same way Suprematist artists – such as Kazimir Malevich (1915) – used abstract painting to substitute the “touch” of collage elements for “sight.”

The photographed collages in the Absentia series make use of the shadows between each layer. A disorientation occurs when the viewer is, at times, unsure of which layer rests on top and which below. The interleaves begin to morph into one another reflecting the idea of a world in continuous movement and constant change.

* The Latin origin of the word “abstraction” is abstrahere meaning to withdraw; drag away from; separate. This literal meaning of abstraction relates directly to my act of cutting away the downloaded primary plant species from their original photographic context. It also carries a figurative meaning associated with the plant species being dragged away/separated from their natural habitat.