Skate Park and Interpolations

Skate Park.

In this series of photographs, I remade the contours of a western suburban skate park into images that straddle the line between the ordinary and the undefined. To me certain of the images appear organic, but also pretty alien. The shots are not composites and were taken in early morning and late afternoon sunshine.

These are photographs of shapes with content but without obvious form.  I wasn’t aiming for any specific intellectual content. I suppose it’s really about having to consider what we each bring to decoding something novel. 

Interpolation.

Using certain skate park images, I stitched replicas together to form something completely different but clearly related to the original images. The results are a somewhat archeological experience, like interpolating a vase from its fragments.

The Batture as Edge.

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Billowing tarps on high-rise construction. Chicago, IL 2015

“It is nonetheless, a wild place. Nobody manages the batture, not down in the trees. Its ownership and occupation are a tangle of obscure authorities, some as primitive as squatter’s rights, and a briar patch for lawyers. Parish police monitor what they can see from their automobiles passing by on the levee top, and one levee board has gone a step further by posting NO TRESPASSING signs at the bottom, most of them contradicted by well-used trails that wind past them and into the trees.” Houck, Oliver A. Down on the Batture. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 2010. Print. 

The most interesting edges are places of transition where rules and governing principles relevant to one space fray and splinter as competing or alternative authorities from another space begin to hold sway. Edges are evident wherever an single influence is manifest in at least two ways.