Urban Ephemeris, Documents of the Impossible, 2008 - 2013

A series of 8 digital images, printed on archival pigment paper, 40"x 50" edition of 3.

The urban landscape is shrouded in fog, a blanket of elusive wetness constantly exposing and concealing our view of buildings, people, and streets. This loss of orientation within the city is a departure point for these works, blurring urban space into an amorphous optical maze.

The phenomenon of urban obscurity has been a subject of enduring fascination for artists, tracing back to the works of luminaries such as Constable, Turner, and Friedrich and extending to Monet's iconic series on Rouen Cathedral. In these works, the urban milieu transforms into an elusive, almost spectral entity, where architectural landmarks are shrouded in ambiguity, rendered indistinct and nebulous. Such spaces become fertile ground for symbolic interpretation, embodying notions of transition, permeability, and instability, thereby challenging conventional perceptions of temporality and spatiality.

In my artistic practice, I engage with these enigmatic urban landscapes through extended walks, meticulously documenting their features as a means to navigate the abstract dimensions of space. This approach is fundamentally experiential and subjective, eschewing rational or objective frameworks and favoring a more phenomenological understanding of space. The resultant works offer viewers tactile structures simultaneously enveloped by transient phenomena—structures in a state of flux, caught between the material and the ephemeral.

In these compositions, the viewer encounters the urban environment as if obscured by veils of mist or fog, rendering it ephemeral and ever-shifting. This artistic choice serves to displace the concrete with the temporal, subverting the dominance of human-made structures by highlighting their vulnerability to natural phenomena. Consequently, the viewer is disarmed and confronted with an unfamiliar spatial experience that challenges preconceived notions of the urban landscape. The works thus invite a reevaluation of our relationship with space, encouraging a more nuanced understanding that acknowledges the complex interplay between the material and the phenomenal, the stable and the unstable, in shaping our experience of the urban environment.