Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Chris Engman is working with time and spatial perception, and how meaning is constructed and understood against the fluid dynamics of abstraction and representation. Nevertheless notions vaster than our nevertheless permanant report in the visible leads Chris Engman's works as he inexplicable fact of our existence, the ungraspable experience of time, and the illusive and unknowable nature of reality, struggle, failure, death, illusion, and disillusionment. His work calls attention to our misperceptions - the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think, and how we think we see and think we think - and the inconstant and constructed nature of memory. Engman's photographs aim to speak to the passage of time closer to how it is actually experienced. The photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations as well as records of actions and elaborate processes. In the desert, he affixes strange and complex artefacts, installs frames, as to try to confine these infinite and wild spaces. The set up structures are demanding and require of the artist several days of location, assembly to begin finally the marriage with their natural environment. The trajectory of the sun, its incidence on the relief of these architectures are attentively studied. The infrastructure never aims at the ostentation and succeeds even in leading to forget its learned elaboration; the image, light as the obvious fact stays only. Created in close collaboration with the movements of the sun, the artist erects surrealist-like structures at specific sites using basic materials and earth. Engman works with undeveloped land, ocean views and deserts in creating structures and configurations that not only sit within an environment but disguise or contort our reading of it. His photographs are laboured, and they don’t take short cuts. In that sense Chris Engman works like a sculptor or installation artist who uses photography as a tool. Is a determined, often solitary work, a shape of meditation according to the artist. Chris Engman’s photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations but they are also records of actions and elaborate processes made by the artist. The making of Dust to Dust began with an observation about the way the sun traverses across the sky: that other than solar noon when the sun is the highest it will get, every other moment during the day has a twin moment when the height of the sun relative to the horizon is identical. In the resulting diptych a gravel mound appears to have remained stationary while the landscape itself appears to have moved. The same material that was used to create first one mound, then the second, is now part of the foundation of somebody’s house. The piece is a meditation on impermanence and the fact that not only existence but even the features of the physical world are temporal and will come to an end. "We often say, photographs “capture” time. But to capture something is not to understand it because in the act of capture the thing is changed. My recent work aims at a photography that can speak to the passage of time closer to how it is actually experienced. For example, within the image Three Moments are three highly labored records of moments, each a month apart, each isolated and made into physical objects. The second moment attempts to recapture the first, while the third attempts to recapture them both. The result is meant to feel like a return to a place that may not seem to have changed, yet- since every instance of time and place is singular- it is perpetually and irrevocably being lost." Those photographs are a meditation on impermanence and the fact that not only existence but even the features of the physical world are temporal and will come to an end. www.chrisengman.com