The way

In this wall-mounted sculpture, a car stereo is mounted into a photographic image of a redwood forest. It plays a sparse and evocative guitar soundtrack. The supporting cabinet is finished with timber veneer to resemble a retro home stereo or piece of designer furniture. This work examines how we construct, represent and deploy notions of nature in our contemporary lives. It mixes the languages of furniture design, landscape photography and sculpture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work questions how and where we find space for contemplation and reflection in a contemporary context increasingly defined by temporary social bonds and consumer choices.

Peace unknown

In this freestanding sculpture, domestic ‘in-wall’ speakers are mounted in custom-built cabinets. The speakers play a calming stock music soundtrack. The cabinets are faced with photographic mural wallpaper of a stereotypical waterfall scene. This work examines how we construct, represent and deploy notions of nature in our contemporary lives. It mixes the languages of furniture design, landscape photography and sculpture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work questions how and where we find space for contemplation and reflection in a contemporary context increasingly defined by temporary social bonds and consumer choices.

It will be tonight

In this wall-mounted sculpture, speakers are mounted into a shelf-like object finished with timber veneer. The speakers play a corny groove stock music soundtrack. On top of the shelf sits a digital photographic image approximating a fireplace floating against a colour-gradient background. This work examines how we construct, represent and deploy notions of nature in our contemporary lives. It mixes the languages of furniture design, landscape photography, digital graphics and sculpture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work questions how and where we find space for contemplation and reflection in a contemporary context increasingly defined by temporary social bonds and consumer choices.

Outlook

This wall-mounted sculpture features eight photographic prints displayed on a computer monitor mounting system. The eight panels each swivel and articulate separately. Together, they combine to create an abstract landscape based on a desktop background image of an idyllic tropical setting. Recalling the workstation of a futures trader, logistics manager, or design guru, the screen armature draws out the simultaneously romantic and vacuous characteristics of the imagery. By combining the visual languages of both physical and on-screen desktop environments with the pictorial traditions of landscape and abstraction, this work questions how and where we deploy nature, desire and wonderment in our increasingly technologised lives.

Outcrop

In this wall-mounted sculpture, speakers are mounted into a timber-veneered cabinet. The speakers play a dark, searching soundtrack. Also mounted on the cabinet is a photographic image of a rocky gully in the American desert. This work examines how we construct, represent and deploy notions of nature in our contemporary lives. It mixes the languages of furniture design, landscape photography and sculpture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work questions how and where we find space for contemplation and reflection in a contemporary context increasingly defined by temporary social bonds and consumer choices.

Maternity

Fruiting bodies represents human engagement with and consciousness of a corresponding presence in our landscape. ʻFruiting Bodiesʼ is an instance of the application of this practice employed to ask the viewer to consider how strange is the phenomenon of the fruiting tree. Is it promiscuous to offer your seed openly to the elements, to any who will take it. Is this forbidden? Is it profligate to hide your progeny inside gifts so tempting in their appeal to that most primitive desire, hunger? Is this wholly mere biological expedience evolved to ensure the widest migration of your offspring? Or does it derive from some boundless cosmic generosity? These images invite you to come close to the tree, where within its arms you will find shelter from the sun at its zenith and from the autumnal rains. Fruit is the focus of Jamesʼs lens as it circles deep into the embrace of limbs and leaves.

Luxe

Fruiting bodies represents human engagement with and consciousness of a corresponding presence in our landscape. ʻFruiting Bodiesʼ is an instance of the application of this practice employed to ask the viewer to consider how strange is the phenomenon of the fruiting tree. Is it promiscuous to offer your seed openly to the elements, to any who will take it. Is this forbidden? Is it profligate to hide your progeny inside gifts so tempting in their appeal to that most primitive desire, hunger? Is this wholly mere biological expedience evolved to ensure the widest migration of your offspring? Or does it derive from some boundless cosmic generosity? These images invite you to come close to the tree, where within its arms you will find shelter from the sun at its zenith and from the autumnal rains. Fruit is the focus of Jamesʼs lens as it circles deep into the embrace of limbs and leaves.

Lust

Fruiting bodies represents human engagement with and consciousness of a corresponding presence in our landscape. ʻFruiting Bodiesʼ is an instance of the application of this practice employed to ask the viewer to consider how strange is the phenomenon of the fruiting tree. Is it promiscuous to offer your seed openly to the elements, to any who will take it. Is this forbidden? Is it profligate to hide your progeny inside gifts so tempting in their appeal to that most primitive desire, hunger? Is this wholly mere biological expedience evolved to ensure the widest migration of your offspring? Or does it derive from some boundless cosmic generosity? These images invite you to come close to the tree, where within its arms you will find shelter from the sun at its zenith and from the autumnal rains. Fruit is the focus of Jamesʼs lens as it circles deep into the embrace of limbs and leaves.

Glance

Fruiting bodies represents human engagement with and consciousness of a corresponding presence in our landscape. ʻFruiting Bodiesʼ is an instance of the application of this practice employed to ask the viewer to consider how strange is the phenomenon of the fruiting tree. Is it promiscuous to offer your seed openly to the elements, to any who will take it. Is this forbidden? Is it profligate to hide your progeny inside gifts so tempting in their appeal to that most primitive desire, hunger? Is this wholly mere biological expedience evolved to ensure the widest migration of your offspring? Or does it derive from some boundless cosmic generosity? These images invite you to come close to the tree, where within its arms you will find shelter from the sun at its zenith and from the autumnal rains. Fruit is the focus of Jamesʼs lens as it circles deep into the embrace of limbs and leaves.

Gyration

European Renaissance and Romantic landscape appeared in vistas. The conditions of the industrial revolution and, according to Patrick Maynard and Jonathon Crary, the film camera especially, led to a Modernist re-vision vividly recorded in Xavier Herbert’s contrary Modernist vision, prompted by seeing the Australian bush, its ‘... stunted trees, the mulga and the wilga and the gimlet gum, doing a kind of dance, spinning past, seeming to swing away from the train to the horizon and race ahead, to come back...the same set of trees in endless gyration’.

Passage

 Contribution of a mural scale work from the Vortex series. In  these images of the binocular (as opposed to ‘binocular images’) the vortex effect arises from convergence; two views of the landscape, photographed from separate viewpoints are superimposed in-camera through superimposition on a particular point.

Debris

Debris captures a moment of collision between the natural and built environment. Digital simulations conjure a strange version of gravity within the frame. This technique creates a surreal unease, breaking our expectations of figure and ground in traditional landscape photography. This unease mirrors the new landscape of natural disaster zones; where sea has blended with land and the built environment has been forced back into chaos.

A paisagem em foco: leituras fotográficas de jardim do Seridó-RN

Landscape one of the main concepts in Geography can be understood as social practice and also as a form of spatial representation. In any case, it is necessary to understand it not only by it s visual instance though its visual instance is an important part of its own identity , but also as a signifying system that produces meaning through many forms of representation. Within this framework, the photographic image is an alternative field for the building, elaboration, re-elaboration and perception of the landscape. Within this context, the main objective of this work is to produce an understanding of Jardim do Seridó s landscape through the reading of its simbolic text built through the photographs taken by José Modesto de Azevedo, a photographer well known as Zé Boinho , in the period from 1950 to 1980. The way in which a specific representation of a particular geography works within the photographic paradigm, considering the narrative construction of urban space and landscape, constitutes the framework from which the concept of landscape is built. So, this work has taken into consideration the writings of authors such as Aumont (1993), Dondis (1997), Cosgrove (1998), Duncan (2004) e Shama (1996), Castoriadis (1982), etc. Thus, this work aimed to highlight that the urban space photographs narrative built by Zé Boinho is an important alternative field for the understanding of how Jardim do Seridó s landscape became a symbolic representation for the collective imaginary of the city

Fotografia e paisagens da modernidade : Currais Novos/RN de 1950 a 1980 / Gênison Costa de Medeiros

This dissertation promotes a dialogue between visual representation and the new cultural geography theory to critically examine the photography representation of an specific urban landscape. The interest here is to explore the ways in which the images of the city of Currais Novos - RN, captured by the photographer Raimundo Bezerra from 1950 to 1980, have taken a great part in shaping people s understanding and imagination of this city s modernizing process. What comes out of this work is the comprehension of that photography permites a geographical study of urban landscape as it can revel perceptions, imaginations, discourses e subjetivities which are based on especific urban cultural dreams and aspirations related to the case studied. So, the aim of this dissertation was to analyse how the discourse of modernity could be seen as part of and impregnated to the urban landscape of Currais Novos by Bezerra s photographs. Then, an intertextual, hermeneutic and phenomenalogical understanding of the geographic object and how it fits within the cultural context was fundamental

Black maps/vivid waters : beauty and horror in David Maisel's The Lake Project and Terminal Mirage

"This paper examines The Lake Project and Terminal Mirage, the two components of David Maisel’s Black Maps series that concern water. Like the section of the Salt Lake chosen by Robert Smithson for his seminal Spiral Jetty, the alkaline waters Maisel photographs are subject to infestations of bacteria that that give them a visceral hue. Smithson provides a reference for this work; the artists are notable for their shared site, disorienting scale, and attraction to entropy"