Description
Untitled (Evanescent) is a series of images produced via “film soup,” the process of submerging film in a combination of various materials. Though there exists common recipes and elements for the solutions, the results can never be guaranteed nor replicated. As a result, there is a relinquishing of control in regards to the outcome, something not typically expected or desired when it comes to working with film, but every bit the kind of experience I was aiming for.
With some trial and error, and despite being contrived in the end, the final images I feel emulate the most what I was aiming for with this project: vague, sometimes near unrecognizable forms of birds seemingly caught within the void of an otherworldly landscape. I wanted the subjects to be so woefully removed from their context that they became something else entirely — no longer an image, and instead scenes created neither by hand nor camera but by the film itself. Some of the forms created during this process appear microbial in shape, as if the film had mutated and became a living breathing organism itself. The surrealistic nature of the work, the literal and metaphorical layers involved during the process of making them, and the scale of the digital enlargements are all aspects that come together to make a series I feel very proud and satisfied with.
Untitled (Evanescent) is a project more about the process of manipulating the film, creating the soup, and experimenting with the results, than it is about the final images. The images are residuals of the experience, evidence of the process, rather than something that was sought out from the beginning. The effect the soup had on the film was entirely unknown, and thus impossible to predict. In this way, Untitled (Evanescent) completely recontextualizes the images and their subject into something exciting and new.