Voce Fuori Campo (2019) consists of interrelated bodies of work: Darkness Above and Light Below, begun from failed Polaroid images of New York City's urban community gardens where overexposure and insufficient chemistry resulted in the corrosion of the photograph as a document of time and place.

Hand rendered into the Polaroid’s emptied pictorial spaces are hand renderings of the memory of how the eye experienced and moved through the organic and dynamic garden spaces of hallucinatory light, shadow, life, and time.

These overdrawn photographs are enlarged, reworked, and rephotographed. Each step alternates the creation of empty spaces with the filling of them, the expansion through enlargement is stepping closer to and into the image, producing a passage to new territories previously hidden.

The result is a large-scale rendering of a landscape and a new photographic representation, an inversion of the drawing that creates a correlation where both documents differently interpret the same scene. These artworks leave entirely behind the original 3x4 inch direct-positive photo they were born from to produce new highly perceptual images of fluctuating landscapes. 

Voce Fuori Campo is a reflection on an abstracted voice, both part of a scene and outside of it, at liberty to shape our understanding of the world. William Blake, whose pantheistic poetry emphasizes the power and gifts of imaginative vision, the natural world, contradictions, and their connections as being inherent to a greater understanding of our existence, served as a touchstone.

Darkness Above
Inkjet on Baryta
32 ¼ in x 24 ⅜ in
ed. 5

Light Below
Polaroid printed on gampi paper with hand additions of charcoal and graphite
32 ¼ in x 24 ⅜ in
1/1