The Great Divide Series - BOOOOOOOM x Capture 2024 Public Art Open Call Winner
My series The Great Divide was selected for the BOOOOOOOM x Capture Photography Festival 2024 Open Call. Three works from The Great Divide series were chosen to be printed on vinyl and mounted at Lansdowne Station as part of the Canada Line Public Artworks for Capture Photography Festival 2024. The images from the Great Divide series were created through a process stumbled upon by accident and by exploiting a glitch in an older version of Windows Photos.
When viewing RAW files, the photo viewer would start with a low res preview, and then after a second or two, would load the actual RAW image. If one zoomed in the interval before the RAW image loads, and then zooms out after, the image ends up being a combination of the low resolution preview and the RAW, with the area that was zoomed in usually showing correctly, and the rest of the image showing very glitched. This is exacerbated by the fact that these images are already photographs of photographs, recaptured from my monitor and introducing the pixels from my monitor as a sort of pixelated material and texture. The overlapping causes interference patterns and beautiful rainbows, and the image windows created within also speak to a disconnect between humanity and nature, a philosophical “Great Divide” that is meant to separate us from the dangerous wilds of nature and keep us in the safety of civilization and human-crafted environments. The windows speak to this isolation from nature as an element of Western philosophies and their tendencies towards materialism, as well as capitalisms reduction of nature into units and resources that can produce monetary value.
These works also touch on technoromanticism through glitch exploitation, as the technique I used was long since removed from Windows Photos, as well as the romantic nature of the mountainous subjects. But on closer inspection one sees mountains hardly covered in snow, and trees burnt bare standing like sticks in the landscape. The digital documentation of our rapidly changing environment is itself rapidly changing and existing digital copies might even become corrupted or degraded over time as small errors occur over time when copying and transferring images. All of these elements come together as urgent issues