Laura Turner
Palimpsest
Objects have an ability to retain a trace of the people who have owned them, or the events they have been present for. Ask any collector of memorabilia, tea cups, Star Wars action figures, or anyone on The Antiques Roadshow. Whether we consciously acknowledge this fact or not, we often personify objects in this way, in their ability to have their own sort of memory or personal history. Places can fill a similar role; rooms, couches, tables and buildings can have their own energy, like the building on your block that has been 10 different restaurants, each one mysteriously a failure. Each had an owner or residents, and each retains some sort of memory of their actions.
Objects can also represent larger events or movements in society. A plastic shoe mold, whose function is simply to keep the form of an object during shipping, to retain its monetary value to the customer, can come to represent our collective consumer culture, and all the ancillary waste it produces. But it can also be beautiful in its representation, meditative, and a little bit ridiculous. It can represent a desire to find some sort of peace or beauty in what can often feel like a world teetering on the edge of disaster.
Over the past two years, I have been slowly collecting objects, either for their history, or for their representation of larger events in our culture. Some have biographical significance to me, beyond their theoretical importance. Some are more important from an intellectual standpoint, representing ideas; emotions and personal feelings, less so.
In the past I have also photographed spaces and houses, following this same line of reasoning and interest. I am attracted to the beauty of a space or object first and foremost- the quality of light in the room, the colors and textures of the furniture and walls, all carry importance. This beauty serves as a point of departure for me when making an image- it is the gunshot at the beginning of the race. It should, ideally, be the starting point for the viewer as well, beginning a journey through the image, which starts out with this feeling of simple, visual pleasure, but becomes more complex as one examines the image more closely. This is a way of actually extending time within the image- something like making a moving image out of a still one, except that all of the movement takes place through the eyes and the mind of the viewer. In this way, a successful image can become more than a moment; it can begin to create a different world altogether.
self-portrait: Laura Turner