The safety of objects.

This project by Allison Grant on the representation of wilderness and natural beauty is truly disorienting, and it brings out strong contradictions related to a conflicted and nostalgic vision that is proper of contemporary aesthetics. Objects we use and discard regularly as plastics, disposable goods and printed media, become the raw material of her compositions. “Using these materials”, she says on the sidelines of her work, “I construct and photograph landscape scenes that at first seem untouched and pristine, but reveal their artifice upon closer inspection”. What is represented is nothing but our desire, a projection of an unattainable ideal, a reflection of nature’s distant purity. “Tensions between reality and reproduction, nature and synthesis, and permanence and disposability can be found in my photographs. This echoes the wilderness of our modern existence: constructed, idealized, mediated and therefore inaccessible”.

Photo:

© Courtesy of Allison Grant

www.allisongrant.com

(click on the image at right for more pictures)