dmarklaing's photostream

Immersive designer

I’ve been an art director in film&television for going on 20 years, before that I practised architecture. Now I teach drawing, visualization and production design in a film school. It’s fun.

I’ve posted a sampling from two series of conceptual photo-manipulations that I’ve been working on over the past couple of years.
[Obviously, I have a fascination with symmetry and folding; with the transformational power it gives an artist.]

The first series, called "ceremonial landscapes" deals with the manner in which symmetry and axes lead us to assign significance to a landscape, or a particular feature in the landscape—say, a tree, or a mountain. What I call ‘significance’ is called by other ‘the sacred.’ Semiotics, gotta love it.

I’d appreciate any comments you might have.

The second series is called "formal constructions on pornographic themes" It’s just as the title states, reconstructions (by means of folding) of (originally) pornographic images until they’ve been transformed into images that only hint at the original subject.
I hope you find them provocative.

I have a fascination with pornography, not because it ‘turns me on’ or ‘turns me off’ but because it’s everywhere, we seek it out (some of us anyway, it’s a billion-dollar industry) and yet it alarms us that the children may see it. Why?

And why, especially, is almost all of it so visually conventional, so ‘same-old, same-old’?

But I’m not taking a normative position for or against porn, there are plenty of voices in that debate already; I’m just studying the images from a dispassionate, aesthetic-formalist position ... and having some fun making pretty pictures.

(A similar series is called "posing nude for the camera and it plays with the now-out-of-favour aesthetic tradition of the art nude. )

Again, I’d most appreciate your thoughts.

dml