The Room of Mirros

"All try their hands at mimimg, at reapting and at re-creating the reality that is theirs... their whole effort  is to examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which they have just landed." Albert Camus 

The light shines through a prism into a room of mirrors.  It refracts, dividing into a million tiny fractions, chaniging color, taking on new forms. As this light source grows brighter it's offspring come to seem like real objects, with a life wholly separate and of their own. The source itself is soon forgotten all together.
 
Imagine now that the geometry in the room of mirrors is infinitely complex. Every mirror in the room possesses a unique quality, reflecting with infinitely varied degrees of distortion. Furthermore, all these qualities are in constant flux.  In such a condition the occupant of a such room seems to be trapped indeed by the effects of the ephemeral reflections, the fancy of a complicated interior design, neither seemingly in his control.  

But one day the occupant begins to observe the ever shifting phenomenon in which he resides.  The next day he invents a way to record his observations. This allows him to remember himself, and the day after that he learns about the quality of the room in which he resides, notices the great variety of the mirrors' surfaces, and the pattern of change. Finally he sets out to describe it. Time goes by. Entrenched in his process, set in motion by his activities, our hero discovers a hope within himself, a desire to build a room of his own. When he builds his room, he often lingers in it, lost in its own unique effects. He slowly recognizes that the light here is more focused, experience here evokes from him deeper emotions, thought allows for finer and finer distinctions of shade, sensation reaches points of finely differentiated intensities. 

The room of mirrors is a metaphor for the perception phenomena. The private drama and the diversity of perspectives that reside in this interior space form a theater of subjectivity. My practice, as much in life as in art, is the attempt to build the stage for the articulation and the performance of the interior theater. It is the development of a Way to bring the phenomenology and the psychology of perception to the foreground of conciseness.

Theater of Subjectivity

"I consider a photograph interesting whenver a photographer's view of reality does not double my knowledge of the world, but a diffreence between our respective perceptions occurs. The smaller the difference, the more intense is its effect on me. Thus it's less about a precise represnetion of reality than the formulation of the representation of the world. From this viewpoint and within the tenchincal medium, we can talk about the photographer as an author who - on the baiss of facts and by means of minimal shifts of pereception - creates a fiction in close proximity to reality. In literature, I like those stories the best that are told in an understandable, precise language. In the best case, an author cannot only describe the stiuation and objects, but can endow them with a deeper meaning and lets them transcend themselves with a distrubing force. This is an irritating trait of literature (and any other art form) as it depreives us of convictions and poses more questions that it answers." Thomas Weski Draft of a Presenation of the art of William Eggleston

I am drawn to the photographic medium for its imagery closely resembles my interior vision. The function of cutting out slices of the observed world and contextualizing them within a private space mimics the function of perception. The world I observe through the camera lens can easily become a projection of my own theater of subjectivity. Weski's fiction which closely approximates reality is just such a theater, which is always being preformed in the photographer's view finder. The events that take place on this stage have a life of their own, as complicated and rich in meaning and feeling as a living organism.

My own choices are depended on the "feeling" of being moved by the precise combination of many different elements within a moment of time. My selection process is guided by intuition and emotion, by my memories, my past and my sensory experience. Growing up in a small town on the edges of the Moldavian countryside (the former Soviet Union), and immigration at the age of twelve to a large American metropolis - this is where my "minimal shifts of perceptions" originate. My practice is informed by the experience a diaspora's fractured identity infused with nostalgia and longing. Applying this experience to everyday life, I hope to transform what I see in front of me into metaphors.

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