Altered States of Agoraphobia: Internal Landscapes (II)

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Internal Landscapes (II)

Hutchinson, KS

Jefferson, MO

For a while now I have had a fascination with internal and artificial landscapes. It is a theme which has threaded it's way through much of the work I have made in the USA and whenever I am lucky enough to see, or be in one, I always feel strongly compelled to photograph them. These images are a continuation of this occasional series. I am interested in the illusion and the fantasy these places attempt to create and sometimes (in terms of my Cage series) their grim reality too. I love the theatre and suspension of disbelief which goes with standing in a themed museum for example, but what I have always found is these artificial landscapes seem to jar heavily with my own dreams, ideals and experiences and they are always, ultimately, strange, floored and sadly human. Artificial and internal landscapes often force me to consider my own real life experience of landscapes which I have stood or lived in and questions what I have done with them myself, psychically. I think we are all filled with a lifetime - a history of landscapes, which have themselves, in turn, become a part of who we are as individuals. They become part of our own mental geography, full of archetypes, symbols and markers - integrating themselves inside, with special and personal significance. I always find it interesting and amazing, for example, when a landscape I have recently (or not recently) experienced suddenly becomes the location of a dream I have had. Why has this particular landscape or place been chosen to play out the drama of this dreams events at this time? It is something I find endlessly fascinating.. Text adapted from a previous post.

St Louis, MO

Jefferson City, MO Part one of this post can be found here: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/01/wemego-ks-oz-museum-behind-curtain.html A Flickr slideshow of my Cage series can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonpaulkossoff/sets/72157624733834338/show/

1 comment:

Lise UtneNovember 18, 2011 at 7:42 AM
Compelling, Simon!
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Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.