“GULP (Generative Urban Landscape Project)”
A gulp of water, a gulp of air, a gulp of reality…
In this photographic project, the ubiquitous Southern California pool becomes a medium through which the surrounding landscape is interpreted. The peculiar garden that is urban Southern California would not exist without water. Here it is viewed through that chlorinated lens. Descending into water, my movement, and the exhalation of my breath, causes distortion of the surface. Pictures are made looking upward. The water is clear, but distorts; the landscape can be intuited but the perspective is indeterminate. The resulting cognitive dissonance forces viewers to sense, rather than read, the images. Verisimilitude has never been my goal: instead it is to provide a sensual springboard for interpretation. My work has addressed issues of self, place, and memory through an appeal to the viewer’s body, using sculptural forms and architecture to do so. This new project takes me back to photography, which was my first love as an artist.
Using the sensual immediacy of large-scale photographic imagery I aim to cajole viewers out of their learned response to the environment into a more sensory experience of it, and back into their bodies, so to speak. The images are generated by an action, the descent under water. When viewers stand in front of the finished pictures, they find themselves inserted into the action and by extension into my presence there. The physical nature of the finished objects is therefore intimately connected to their effectiveness. The scale of the images the intensity of the color, the reflective surfaces play crucial roles in the work.
-Daniel Wheeler
