Artist's Statement By Brynn Shepherd
This project explores the often complex relationship between life and art, reality and illusion. The following passages from Dave Hickey's Air Guitar served as inspiration:
It's not so much what we do, or even what happens, it's the way things overlap and intersect. [p. 181]
For three centuries, illusionistic images aimed to slow life down – to make visible the fluid, violent, and often invisible constituents of temporal cultural experience. Then, in the nineteenth century, with the apotheosis of modernity, artists stopped slowing down life into images and began slowing down the images themselves. [p. 185]
The black-and-white photograph, with its chromatic phase shift, does very much the same thing [as a painting by Monet], allowing us to have our modernity and our melancholia too – since both idioms, due to the attenuated nature of our transport into the domain of the image, tend to prioritize the plangent lostness of the past over the living conception of it that you find in, say, a portrait by Raphael. [p. 186]
The interactive gallery displayed above represents my attempt to discover unexpected connections between different types of images. By quite literally overlapping and intersecting photographs with paintings, I hope to establish a meaningful relationship between them that previously did not exist. The photographs were taken by me in downtown Philadelphia, while the paintings are works from art history, most from the Impressionist period and a few from the early twentieth century.
I've always had a very strong emotional response to Impressionism, probably because so many of those works reveal slices of everyday life without ever providing the whole story. We see a snapshot of people in a cafe or an early morning sunrise, but we never get all the details. We can relate to the subject matter, but we never fully understand what's going on, which makes us want to keep looking. When I look at a painting by Monet or Degas, I'm always tempted to invent a narrative for the scene; I want to give its figures thoughts, motivations, and histories. I experience a similar reaction to the work of Edward Hopper, who, while not an Impressionist, often deals with similar subject matter.
In an even more pronounced, immediate way than the paintings, the photographs are snapshots of modern life, images that try to capture ordinary experience but ultimately lack a narrative and leave that as a task for the viewer. I'm interested in the extent to which a photograph can ever truly represent reality, and the ways we might change the meaning of a photograph by imposing our own experience on its supposedly objective content.
All images reside within a matrix of connections to other images, ideas, and experiences, but these connections often go unnoticed. The more of them we can discover, the more everyday life will continue to surprise and delight.
Instructions: To view a photograph, click on one of the thumbnails. Now hover over the image, and a painting will be overlaid on top of the photograph. If you click on the image at this point, the painting will continue to fade in all the way. Navigating away from the image will return you to the original photograph.
