DIANNE BLELL
FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

My new series, tentatively titled Artifacts, is comprised of computer-assisted cutouts of life-size furnishings and discarded fragments as exquisite remnants, composited in plexiglass and mounted in relief against vast black voids. These works are a result of a synchronous printing, cutting, and mounting process where the photograph becomes a haptic physical entity and perceptually near rather than remote and representational. As such, ruinous life-size pieces become topographic reliefs in a spatial void unconfined by their original and quotidian contexts — a visual parallel to the Latin philosophy “ubi sunt,” meaning “Where are those who were before us?" In this way, our personal “artifacts” entropically decay alongside us, often outliving us, as ubiquitous symbols through which to acquiesce to a shared gravitas and pathos of ephemerality, mortality and obsolescence.