Jon-Phillip Sheridan
Direct Object 13
2010
Series Statement
I use the environs where these pictures are made as sets to create narrative potential outside the normal. I work at night to heighten the cinematic potential of the images using the found stage lighting of the urban environment. I focus on discrete isolated spaces, looking for marks of human actions and evidence of daily routines. I photograph in constructions sites, loading docks, and smoke break nooks behind run down strip malls. This is an archeology of the day to day: the remnants and ephemera - crumpled paper lunch bags, styrofoam cups, and piles of snow are suspended in a state of arrested instability. To quote Matthew Thompson, photography, “is an inherently analytic discipline”, the hyperrealism of large format photography magnifies the subjects material nature, creating a paradoxical ambiguity existing between presence and absence, the material and its representation.