Joy Bush
Attending to the Ordinary is the result of daily walks in an outdoor museum through which I reimagine the familiar.
In "Suspended Disbelief" shrubberies take on shapes that require us to suspend our disbelief in how they grow. The initial intent of this project was to photograph nature so as to erase any sense of scale. By framing the upper edges of a shrub, removed from its context save for the sky, no reference of dimension remained. But as I reviewed the images, I recognized a further refinement that was latent in them. Pairs of images came together, literally and figuratively, to create entirely new forms. What initially appeared to be objects and their reflections, were revealed as a paradox which could only exist in the image itself, some of them simply floating in space. The familiar and ordinary worlds had now been reinvented to demand a suspension of disbelief from its viewers.
In "Daily Runes" the images take stock of the mundane and unintentionally creative aspects of everyday life. Leaves and water create new art works. Marks and sprayed signage that are patches on sidewalks and roadways, created by anonymous artists who are unaware of their inventions, are revealed as collections of runes without translation. These accidental and spontaneous abstractions both perplex and fascinate and become an ideogrammatic language unto themselves. They are small wonders that we usually overlook; these photographs remind us not to.
In "Suspended Disbelief" shrubberies take on shapes that require us to suspend our disbelief in how they grow. The initial intent of this project was to photograph nature so as to erase any sense of scale. By framing the upper edges of a shrub, removed from its context save for the sky, no reference of dimension remained. But as I reviewed the images, I recognized a further refinement that was latent in them. Pairs of images came together, literally and figuratively, to create entirely new forms. What initially appeared to be objects and their reflections, were revealed as a paradox which could only exist in the image itself, some of them simply floating in space. The familiar and ordinary worlds had now been reinvented to demand a suspension of disbelief from its viewers.
In "Daily Runes" the images take stock of the mundane and unintentionally creative aspects of everyday life. Leaves and water create new art works. Marks and sprayed signage that are patches on sidewalks and roadways, created by anonymous artists who are unaware of their inventions, are revealed as collections of runes without translation. These accidental and spontaneous abstractions both perplex and fascinate and become an ideogrammatic language unto themselves. They are small wonders that we usually overlook; these photographs remind us not to.
