LIMINAL | LISA KLAPSTOCK
27.11.2004 | 16.01.2005
With a focus on everyday environments, I use the camera to investigate place and its human occupation. My practice explores mechanisms of seeing and the ways in which photography affects and challenges visual perception. Between 1998 and 2002, I worked in the laneways of my downtown Toronto neighbourhood, photographing surface details and overlooked spaces. Laneways are narrow passageways running along the back of residential properties, behind fences and garages. They are a hidden environment in the city and one in which the boundary between public and private realms is mutable. A garage door opens and becomes a window into another space that opens into yet another, the backyard. The garage interior becomes public when the door is opened; or conversely the laneway is privatized as the garage contents and occupants expand into the lane. Although the laneway is a public space, my presence as a photographer is largely unwelcome; and I am often made to feel as though I am trespassing.
My early works from the laneway project explore the role of photography in questioning our relationship to the built environment; in revealing the invisible; and in confounding perceptions of scales. These works present images of surface fragments that evoke things other than what they are: the body (Excavations and Umbilicus), landscape (Panorama), and infinite space (Cosmos).
Subsequent laneway works, like Living Room, Threshold, and Crossover, focus on spatial delination and the way the camera affects our perception of space. Living Room is an ongoing series of self-portraits that document a performative occupation of the laneway. Encased in white protective coveralls, I seat myself, uninvited, on a stranger’s discarded furniture, and make a record. Through this act, I create a temporary space for myself in the public sphere, and draw attention to boundaries separating public and private realms.
In Threshold, I documented the boundaries themselves – fences and walls separating the laneway from the backyard – and the abstract views glimpsed through minuscule holes and gaps in their surfaces. The images are colour fields interrupted by fragments of sharply focused views. The work invites voyeurism, and at the same time frustrates your ability to really see anything. The images are devoid of people and this emptiness draws attention to the isolation and alienation that often characterizes city life. In this work, I am interested in shifting the viewer’s attention to the act of looking and to their own visual perception.
I am also interested in exploring the limitations of the photographic medium. In Threshold, an everyday environment is made unfamiliar by the camera which flattens two realms onto a single surface. Foreground and background coalesce on a flattened plane, reducing the apparent separation between surface and space; outside and inside; public and private realms. Shot with a macro lens and limited depth of field, Threshold reveals scenes that exist solely in photographic form and are invisible to the naked eye. At the same time, these images mirror human vision, in that we are not able to simultaneously see a sharply focused background and foreground.
Umbilicus is an ongoing work about classification and the artifice of photography. Photographs of minute punctures and protrusions in walls have been transformed into individual hemispheric objects, and then arranged in grids. I am interested in the shift from a 2-dimensional image into a 3-dimensional object, resulting in an obscuring, or re- thinking, of the photographic nature of the piece. The hemisphere is an eyeball-like viewing device that magnifies the photographic subject and serves a dual purpose as both frame and lens. “Spectrum” comprises two grids made from the same 12 colour negatives printed in 12 colours of the spectrum, and in white. To make this work, I used the photographic enlarger to ‘paint’, mixing my own colours with the filters.
I am currently developing a new installation work that will elaborate my concerns through a focus on perspective and its relationship to the camera. Colour Fields will comprise four videos, each depicting a spatially ambiguous “landscape” that is made comprehensible by the introduction of a human figure(s) into the frame. These videos will be complimented by large-scale photographic diptychs representing the same landscapes.
