13 March 2008
Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison
Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison are a husband & wife team who create wonderfully unique and beautiful images which combine painting techniques and sculpture with photography. I first encountered their work from The Architect's Brother online a few years ago and was as impressed by the aesthetics as I was by the humour. I feel the images make their point without being excessively morose - and it's too easy to go in such a direction given the subject matter.
The images from The Architect's Brother were made using the archaic photogravure process, which explains their unique texture and Victorian-esque look. Their newer, colour work can be viewed on their official site. Personally I prefer the surreal turn their new work has taken - it creates a world even stranger than the monochromatic photogravures of The Architect's Brother.
"I want to make images that have open, narrative qualities, enough to suggest ideas about human limits. I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed."
- Robert ParkeHarrison in this bio
To me some of their newer colour work - especially 'Overflow' (above) and 'Gray Dawn' (below) - looks like it could come straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror or Stalker. And I love that - like they're images of a world halfway between memory and imagination.
Labels: Photography
posted by Abigail at 00:49
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