Statement
My work focuses on depicting the passage of time within the banalities of life through a series of multiple photographic images and drawings. The subject matter ranges from objects, people, memories, places of encounters, and its environments. These images often take form as an installation occasionally accompanied by video and sculptural work. I search for a certain order within the context of the subject matter that allows a transformation from the ordinary and predictable into a liberated complex system that is “honored” and given its space allowing it to be seen in novel ways. In this transformation, time often becomes an essential factor that needs representation. By attempting to understand the correlation, I try to uncover how it could evidence the past, present and or the future in a sequence of images by blurring its lineal nature. In this manner I feel that insights are created between the mundane and the transcendent layer of our existence.
As an intent to look beyond the obvious within my obsession with time, my recent work has been inspired from the “unseen”. To be able to perceive and visualize what can only be achieved by sensorial experience. Evident in the series “Dissonance”, the work departs from the use of photography to explore more intricate random patterns and trajectories delivered from drawings that represent vibrational sound waves. I use a self-built mechanical semi-automated instrument to create the images. Though these drawings I question the function of chance and probability by means of a premeditated and arbitrary intervention over the image. I am able to witness a contraction in a trajectory and time, shown on the paper as an entry point, the past, and exit halting point, the present. By contemplating the present, the stillness, it becomes perceptible that structure cannot exist without chaos.
On the contrary, in the present, I feel we are moving forward in time at an accelerated rate. I wonder if by stopping and contemplating the present as it is and accepting its nature, some sort of order will emerge from chaos, eventually returning us to an existential understanding that free us from its construct.
Elena Kuroda