Vertigo

Surrealism gives artists the tool to properly express the inexpressible. It achieves meaning and impact through the bare use of symbolism and dreamlike imagery. Surrealism focuses on communicating through the absurd and imaginary, a unique form to express emotions that would not be able to be articulated in a plain way.

Inspired by the surrealist movement along with concepts popular during the Bauhaus art movement, this series focuses on simplistic compositions and basic shapes while simultaneously taking an existing environment to morph it into something architecturally impossible. Historical influences of the Bauhaus and artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Erich Consemüller, and Lucia Moholy, also influenced my project as I explored the architectural structures of the Bauhaus in Chicago to reconstruct architectural environments of the downtown area. Vertigo combines intense lighting and practical experimental fragmentation techniques to alter architectural spaces in Chicago. Throughout the series, I explored with manual techniques such as prisms, mirrors, and glass to create anamorphic landscapes. The series attempts to entirely change the original landscapes to create something new and surreal. The images play with reality and the surreal, challenging the traditional ways of photographic truth. Although photography is a medium capable of capturing life at its fullest, Vertigo takes reality and completely shifts it, creating something that is unreal and untruthful.