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Shifting Landscape

Visual Art & Photography

via Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand

Dimension Shift

Black-and-white layered photo-montage with a street food vendor working at right, bags of produce, Japanese packaging printed with “Oh!”, price tags, a bare white tree, a masked face and clusters of people compressed into a crowded street scene.
Oh!

Dimension Shift is a series of black-and-white photomontages created through collage, layered imagery, multiple exposure and the recombination of photographic source material. Many of the current works draw on street and travel encounters, particularly from a visit to Japan, mixed with elements from Croatia and elsewhere. The series, however, is not documentary travel photography. The source material is transformed rather than simply recorded.

In Dimension Shift, the original encounter is broken apart, layered, compressed and rebuilt. Fragments of place, memory, signage, movement and surface gather into images that feel partly witnessed and partly invented. What remains is not a document of a journey, but a reconstructed field of perception: photographic, unstable, densely worked, and slightly out of phase with ordinary looking.

Figures, signs, street markets, interiors, machinery, packaging, trees, tanks, rooms and fragments of public life are woven into dense constructed images. Places become less fixed. A street scene may turn into a dream-space; a shopfront may become a stage; a figure may appear half-real, half-apparition. The images retain something of the energy of observed life, but shift it into a more unstable and ambiguous register.

  • A black and white photo-montage centred on a traditional temple gate with curved roof, with a large transparent female figure facing the camera and holding an umbrella at centre, dense kanji signage at left, passing figures, and a woman walking through at right.
    Stand Still

  • Black-and-white photo-montage of a Japanese street at night, with large illuminated kanji characters above layered figures, bare trees, a vendor’s stall and overlapping architectural fragments compressed into a dense urban scene.
    Street Market
  • Black-and-white photo-montage inside an industrial fish market workspace, with a capped figure standing at right, other workers and machinery layered behind, translucent planes suggesting ice cutting through the middle ground, and a tuna carcass half-visible in the foreground.
    Ice Factory
  • Black-and-white photo-montage with large diagonal planes fragmenting overlapping scenes of figures in a public space, cherry blossom patterns, bare branches and Japanese signage into shifting wedges and layers.
    Drive By

  • Black-and-white layered photo-montage with a large bowed human figure in a jacket and tie, a female face in profile at the left edge, an open hand in the foreground, and fragments of blossom, reeds, branches, roofline and weathered surfaces.
    Oracle

  • Black-and-white photo-montage inside a large fish market, with workers among frozen tuna carcasses and metal trolleys, fragments from different angles of the same location layered across a low-ceilinged industrial space.
    Control Room
  • Black-and-white photo-montage with layered circular mechanical forms, wheels, pistons and turbines massed at the centre, with motion streaks radiating outward toward fragments of windows, a street lamp and architectural details at the edges.
    Steam Powered
  • Black-and-white photo-montage inside a fish market, with tuna carcasses at left, two women laughing at centre framed as if behind glass, market stalls and signage receding behind, and a wet reflective floor below.
    Fish Tank
  • Black-and-white photo-montage with several figures standing across a shallow space, including a woman in a dress at centre and a uniformed figure at right, with dark branches pressing from above and a scan-line texture running across the surface.
    Signal Clearing
  • Black-and-white layered photo-montage of frozen tuna carcasses covering an industrial floor, with a single figure standing among them, ghostly arcs and fragments of workers and faces pressing through the image.
    Among The Dead
  • Black-and-white layered photo-montage of a dense urban roofscape with rooftops, staircases, pipes, satellite dishes, cranes, Japanese technical documents, screens and wires, with a large suited figure bending over the city at left.
    Giant
  • Black-and-white layered photo-montage with a large pale-branched tree above a crowd gathered on open ground, alongside newspaper fragments, a motorbike, a military aircraft insignia, an Asahi beer advertisement, shoes, tarps and scattered belongings.
    Beer Bomber

  • Black-and-white layered photo-montage with large goggle-like lenses at the centre, surrounded by blurred architectural and mechanical forms streaking outward in radial motion.
    Optometry

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