Artifacts

“After years of working with conventional perspective as a way to represent space, I was interested in an alternative method that was more sympathetic to the unexpected ways in which people adapted to and reconfigured these environments. Photographed in Tokyo and Kyoto during the fall of 2022, they are presented here as a catalogue of figure ground studies. Individual buildings have been digitally extracted, suplurvious details removed and recomposed over a field of color. They have become reverse architectural drawing in a way, more intimate, and closer in experience

In the context of my previous work, Artifact, is less about making a conventional image and more about addressing what we are seeing and how we see it. Buildings in Tokyo often stand isolated by scale, purpose, and aesthetics – indifferent to their surroundings but proud of where they are. Gas stations exist next to temples, while old wooden houses sit between new concrete hotels.To take it all in, one is forced to see selectively,to mitigate what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of information. However, the camera is less selective and I’ve always found the images I have made here mildly dissatisfying. Visually it was all too much – my eyes could see through the noise,but the lens couldn’t, at least not if I continued to follow my own established conventions.These images are in response to that observation, which I hope can serve as a kind of visual self-inquiry into what a photograph is or should be”.

David Burdeny, Vancouver, 2023