Julia Wilson

This body of work explores the relationship between text and image, digital versus analog practices, and the representational capacities of visual and verbal languages. Using the large format view camera, I photograph words, images, reflections, and grit, on my personal computer. As a result, the images emphasize the gradual degradation of its surface overtime – what we usually consider infinite space, becomes visibly finite. The clearly visible surface of the screen redirects the viewer’s attention from what the photograph is representing (the subject) to the unintended and overlooked attributes of the medium—surfaces, context, and materiality.

 

The meaning of this work is seated in our relationship to and the relationship between text and image in the contemporary climate of screen-based information dissemination: how we are accustomed to processing this information, and how we can rethink that system - to estrange the apparent familiarity of language by means of breaking it down and re-contextualizing it. Words and images become linked with uncertainty,

 

This work hopes to have the viewer experience photography and words outside of their cultural debasement, absent of the everyday and unceasing dogma; the “aboutness” of the work is fluid and resides in the individual viewer. All of these images originated from fragmented experiences of my life, reformed and manifested into a final image – but nevertheless their interpretations are not confined to that. Overall, I hope to demonstrate the very conscious decisions we are able to make, when we truly pay attention to what we are visually experiencing, in constructing meaning from language.