Strata of an Image
A camera captures light, imprisoning a moment. Just as when an image is photosensitized onto a silkscreen, a certain moment in time becomes fixed onto the film. Around the time when images of things that have never existed began to be created by artificial intelligence and seep into daily life, I began to direct my attention toward the earth. I traveled in search of layered strata, patterns left behind where water had passed, and lands moving with volcanic activity. In order to accept what ‘exists’ virtually, I needed the physical process of actually seeing, feeling, and touching the traces of things that had physically existed.
Even in the earth of a future world where the fossils of images will become codes and prompts, magma still boils, stalactites grow, and new species emerge. To hold my ground amidst floating abstract concepts, stalactites, stone pillars, and the fossils of primitive whales, I took photographs with an old film camera and transferred them to a computer to digitalize them. Then, I passed them through light and screens once again to print them onto a single surface.
Printmaking felt like the perfect medium for building up the layers of the process an image undergoes to be generated, much like geological strata. I found it intriguing how various living organisms, grown through endless division over a given period of time, meet equally in two dimensions through the cross-section of a stratum. Wetting my hands, pushing the ink—through these physical acts, I imagined the fossils of the strata where my own life and contemporary times would eventually be buried. I thought of the organisms that adapt and live in caves filled with darkness. I pondered the long process through which lyricism and narrative become embedded within a single image, a single engraved word.
Instead of separating the world of traces and the world that will leave traces into past and future, I place them together on a single sheet of drawing paper called the ‘present moment.’ Through this, I am currently in the process of continuing my attempt to find the meaning of life as a human being, an individual possessing my own unique entity.