Photography and memory have an interesting, even intertwined relationship. Each is critical to how we view our past, yet an unreliable record of what truly happened.
Patricia Voulgaris was inspired by the analogy between lapses in our memory and the things unseen just beyond the frame of a photograph. Her abstract photo sculptures illustrate what our spotty, or downright faulty, recollection of a specific moment might look like. Splintered shapes and colors are layered over and interlocked with recognizable elements like geometric patterns or an errant body part.
“I base a lot of my images off of ideas and things I’ve been thinking about, like memories from my childhood, and I sort of break them down and create them into these graphic sorts of abstract images,” says Voulgaris, whose Fragments series won the PDN Grand Prize for mixed media this year. “I’m very interested in what you actually remember versus what your mind creates, and the sorts of voids you might have in your head. Some things might not be clear---the truth is kind of obscured in that way and I’m interested in investigating that more.”
Each image is a unique arrangement of the familiar and the vague, intricately composed with a subtle interplay of line, form, light and shadow. Voulgaris drew inspiration from contemporary artists currently experimenting with abstraction, and has developed her own visual style that seems to peer into someone's frontal cortex. Voulgaris works at home with a single light, whatever materials she has on hand, and the occasional patient family member. She'll spend hours arranging her sculptural assemblages and shooting frames until a satisfying image emerges.
“A lot of it is construction and reconstruction in my process," she says. "It’s a lot of work. I cover the walls with paper, scraps, anything that I can find. Sometimes I even get my mom to model, my friends, people that I know that are just comfortable having paper on them for semi-long periods of time, while I kill myself with the lighting.”
This body of work, which appears at Photoville in NYC September 18-28, is divided between the black and white images of Fragments, and the color images of Hidden in Plain Sight. Before becoming interested in creating ambiguous sculptural images, Voulgaris had like many photography students been pursued more traditional portraiture. She woke up one morning after her first year at New York’s School of Visual Arts (she graduated in 2013) feeling an urge to embrace abstraction.
“I’ve always been interested in abstract photography but I never really took the initiative to do it the way that I wanted to," she says. "And one day it just clicked within me … I don’t know, I just woke up one day and I started making black and white abstract photographs, it was just the strangest thing, it’s still strange to me today.”
