Ben Alper


Projects

                                                                

                                         
A Series of Occurences  (2016)
Pigment prints
12 x 18”
Book documentation viewable here.

This body of work explores the photograph’s unique ability to exist as both indexical object and poetic fiction.  While the images find aesthetic influence in more evidentiary forms of image making, the conceptual methodology of such practices is noticeably absent. Abstraction and ambiguity pervade, context is denied and a sense of familiarity begins to give way to a more enigmatic and unsettling experience of the everyday. Instead of attempting to elucidate as much as possible, these photographs disassociate and fragment the world into an uneasy collection of images, or ‘occurrences’.  

The result is the construction of a kind of ‘anyplace’, one rooted less in cultural or geographic specificity than in the potential for inanimate objects and spaces to manifest symbolic tension. Sometimes that tension exists between presence and absence; other times it’s found in the relationship between the natural and the artificial.  And still other times it is manifested by the flattening or confusion of space, an experience which unsettles our perceptions of the world around us.