STATEMENT 2

I am trying to use multiple images to suggest a traveler's journey of discovery. Cinema is one of several influences, in the many ways that a cut between two different angles of the same scene can open up, or close down, the space, or that camera movement can reshape an entire locale. In film or on paper, images can construct a visual architecture, new ways of seeing space and objects. Presenting an object or locale through multiple images is also a way of undercutting any single view, creating, for the viewer, a voyage through different levels of awareness. Multiple views can also suggest, by extrapolation, an infinitely large number of different ways of seeing an object. Pre-1750 Western polyphonic music, which layers several melodic lines at once, is an inspiration for my image interweavings, while my arrangements are meant to suggest the arbitrariness of all human conceptions. It is also hoped that rhythms develop within a work, between different images on a page and between one page and the next.

We should struggle to shed the subjective filters and biases, personal and social, through which we see. A real estate developer looks at a field and envisions a subdivision. A civil engineer looks at grasslands and maps out a highway. We see a restaurant and think of food, without stopping to look at light patterns on the sidewalk outside or to consider its place in the townscape. Flight attendants ask passengers to pull the shades, shutting out our planet so that others can better see the movie. A driver motors across a landscape, eyes fixed on the road ahead, a necessary limitation that nonetheless excludes so much. Our diseased world's frightening spiral toward ruin through immoral and pointless wars, eco-catastrophe, or both, which derive from human biases and interventions, compels us to step back from imposing our false knowledge on our eyesight. Might we instead try to rediscover the naive early glances of a child, reveling in the moment of first discovery of the miraculous isness of things?

Fred Camper
Chicago, Illinois
December 2, 2006.