Quoted By:
The most compelling quality of the work ITT is the denial of mimesis. Ur certainly checking a lot of the boxes for a modern practice of pictorial photography. In any case I have two more or less random thoughts:
A)
The figure of the mantis ineluctably evokes the conceptual legacy of surrealism (in Caillois, Bataille, Dalis, etc.). Its visual presentation evokes the style of science fiction. Although like surrealism sci-fi too is a rather historicized category; it's not nearly as pure or innocent (i.e. as aesthetically autonomous) a "visual language" as your images seem to conceive of it. The fact that your cube-shaped "monolith" was a locally found, indeterminate object sort of illustrates this point, in that its rarefied presentation in the images represses all the preexisting conditions that determined its specific appearance as such; in short, it's an issue of fetishism--not of eradicating fetishism, which is obviously impossible, but of clarifying the relative intensity and function of the object-fetishes in your pictures: on the one hand the mantis is the locus of a subjective identification, and on the other the sci-fi backdrop is universalized as a naturalizing frame. So it's a problem of negotiating between the values (formal, historical, political even) which are accorded to each of them in the images, and the extrinsic factors which create these meanings. Do some things have to be obscured/occluded for the figurative contents of the pictures to make sense? It kind of seems that way, doesn't it? The two projects you've referenced ITT seem to recast the unconscious (in its more bataillean sense) as the cosmos, reconfiguring its repressed primal urges as an inscrutable alien agency. There is a tradition for this kind of shift, of course, in science fiction like J.G. Ballard.
