Even though the timing and subject matter seem to suggest it, this is not a lockdown project. No quarantine muse, no solitude ache turned art. In fact, I have not yet been constrained by any rigid lockdown measures despite experiencing this pandemic in three different countries, one of which had imposed a strict confinement some months prior to my arrival.
That this series of photos could very well be born out of a lockdown home and heart is mere coincidence. My senses weren’t sharpened by isolation, nor did I actively look to find and shoot the extra in the ordinary within a tight home radius, when one night I spotted a galaxy in the frosted glass of a bathroom window I had known for the longest time.
"My previous obliviousness to the obvious, to something so strangely beautiful, can only be attributed to the eternal sleep of the wake, the attention lost in everyday attentiveness."
My previous obliviousness to the obvious, to something so strangely beautiful, can only be attributed to the eternal sleep of the wake, the attention lost in everyday attentiveness. Now, a closer look revealed hidden worlds inside this thin layer between inside and outside world, worlds that were not trapped but most dynamic, popping into and out of existence wherever light met the eye at the right or wrong angle.
Street light, brake light, flash light, bubbly light, dark light, bright light, light light; every light was its own realm in this thin slice of universe. And each one had its own temperature – purple, orange, green, red – color spectrum neighbors and strangers coming together in an orgy of textures.
"[...] as though this surrealism was an extension of reality rather than a parallel fantasy world, something beyond real, ultra-natural, hyper-aesthetical, divinely logical, a mighty grandness hidden away in the miniature, in the macros of the micro, and a harmonic and coherent falling together of particles in the grander scheme of the wider angle."
No funky postproduction acrobatics were performed on these photographs, yet somehow they appear surreal, like computer visualizations of themselves. And while this unintended effect irritates me, something about it speaks to me, as though this surrealism was an extension of reality rather than a parallel fantasy world, something beyond real, ultra-natural, hyper-aesthetical, divinely logical, a mighty grandness hidden away in the miniature, in the macros of the micro, and a harmonic and coherent falling together of particles in the grander scheme of the wider angle.