The House

These are works from an ongoing photographic project in which familiar urban spaces are recreated using simple means and photographed to create convincing illusions. The images depict typical urban scenes based on my memories of places in the city of Vancouver. Like a theater stage, the images in this series invite the viewer to enter an illusionistic space where the image can exist somewhere between imagined and depicted. 

I recreate scenes from private and public settings such as the family room, a street with speeding traffic, or the view from a window at night, using simple elements such as cardboard, paper, and rudimentary mechanisms to add motion. There is no digital manipulation in these images - the illusion, at once realistic and evidently contrived, is limited to the sense of space in the constructed sets.

These images reduce typical settings of quotidian life to their basic structures and conventions. My intention is to create an illusionistic and equivocal space where the recognizable and familiar becomes strange – uncanny – and can be experienced anew.


PM