Oh, He's My Brother, 2009 from At the Seams, by Kate Stone
One of my favorite parts of looking through Hey, Hot Shot! entries—and looking at art in genera—is that each viewing stirs up the strangest of memories and forms an untidy web of visual and conceptual associations. When I came across the work of contender Kate Stone this morning, I suddenly remembered a documentary I watched on Discovery Channel when I was eight. What drew me into the program back then was choppy footage of the Loch Ness Monster and recorded spottings of UFOs. Today it finally hit me that the what I was watching was actually a history of photo-manipulation.
It's easy to assume that photography is fact, but even before Adobe Photoshop made it dangerously effortless to alter images, tricksters were skillfully cutting and pasting away to (ostensibly) fake photographs of sea monsters, alien encounters, and all manners of the supernatural. Kate's series At the Seams employs these same lo-fi methods of manipulation to create images that pass for normal at first glance, but quickly reveal themselves to be crude, yet complex illusions.
Kate writes:
I used photographs of domestic interiors and common architecture to construct impossible, uncanny spaces that evoke a feeling of hesitant curiosity, a nervous desire to explore the room, to peek around the bend or to see what lies behind the door at the end of the hall. Our acceptance of photography as reality makes these images hard to understand, especially for those who know the original place. At first glance the rooms and buildings in these photographs appear real. Upon closer examination, however, something is clearly wrong. Doorways are misplaced and once rigid walls are twisted and torn. Distorted perspective creates incongruent angles and improbable shadows. These spaces are literally falling apart at the seams.
What's interesting about photo-manipulation is that it always carries with it the question of motive—why, and for whom was this reality changed or constructed? The Loch Ness fakers were most certainly chasing money and fame, but Kate's images are in pursuit of narrative. Each image is titled with a phrase reminiscent of lyrics from a song or a line from a book but they appear to be made up entirely. At the Seams draws me irresistibly into the mind-bending constructs of perspective and narrative, but the photograph's logic is ultimately impenetrable. Once you've looked twice, it´s almost certain that you'll look again, and again, and again.
Debbie Downstairs, 2009 from At the Seams by Kate Stone
Kate's fascination with questioning authority and altering truth continues into her series The Pinchbeck Habitats, which cuts up and reconstructs natural history museum dioramas.
Kate writes:
The museum's air of authenticity persuades viewers to animate the scene with their imaginations, to ignore the artifice and believe what they see. The Pinchbeck Habitats, like the dioramas, combine three dimensions with two and blend the real with the constructed, creating an illusion of reality. But in these habitats the manipulation and distortion are brought to the foreground, pushing the limits of the imagination and trust of their viewers.
Untitled from The Pinchbeck Habitats by Kate Stone
Ultimately, Kate describes the motive behind her work best when she writes, "the power of photography forces the viewer to suspend disbelief for the sake of wonder." You can view more work, including full sets of work from both of the series mentioned above, at Kate's website.