My intention as an artist is to combine elements of painting, sculpture and installation through photography. The current work uses eight-foot fluorescent tube lamps encased in color gels to create site-specific, single-frame time exposure photographs at night. The tubes move across the topography of a landscape or in relation to a built structure, to create a vibrant, purely photographic reality, while allowing the existing setting to remain visible.
The process is both deliberate and intuitive. There is the considered placement of the camera and tripod, and the overlapping of colored illumination to create new hues using light’s additive palette. The speed at which the bulb travels, the preferred density and saturation of color, the placement of color, and the patterning of the bulbs are all intuitive decisions that arise while work is being made. The photographs all happen in real time–there is no digital imaging used.
In this work, the light burns the emulsion of the film and creates images that otherwise would not exist, like paintings. And as with paintings, it is best for individual viewers to experience their own direct responses on a personal level.