honorable mention
Joel Simpson united states
title
The Surreal in the Real: The Concrete Irrational
This is what I seek to do in my near-field images of rock and ice. I capture images along a figuration-to-abstraction continuum, not dissimilar to that of “late” surrealists, such as Matta, Arshile Gorky, and Wolfgang Paalen, traveling far and wide to find especially provocative locations. It takes me from the wind-and-water eroded sandstones of Little Finland, NV, and Fantasy Canyon, UT, to the ice caves and frozen craters of Iceland. In these places I discover what Dalí called the “concrete irrational” in his own work, although my subjects are literally concrete.
My version of pareidolia, therefore, tilts toward the ironic and surreal. It embraces but is not limited to imaginary creatures, ancient ruins, bizarre fossils, grimacing masques, heavenly bodies, eroticism, architectural fantasies, grotesque homunculi, and ominous settings. It constitutes an in situ cabinet of curiosities—humorous, frightening, ironic—dispersed across the geological and glacial landscape. I have also discovered a particularly apt use of the fisheye lens for the ceilings of grottos (see last entry).
back to gallery
entry description
The real world of rock and ice can be seen as alive with a virtual population of imaginary beings—a projective phenomenon originally identified as a pathology by a German psychiatrist in 1866 and dubbed “pareidolia.” The art world generally dismisses the rock eagles, rabbits, and stone faces as artifacts of the popular imagination. However, if the figuration can draw from the prodigious inventory of imaginative creations in the art of the past century, the natural world becomes infused with a novel piquancy.This is what I seek to do in my near-field images of rock and ice. I capture images along a figuration-to-abstraction continuum, not dissimilar to that of “late” surrealists, such as Matta, Arshile Gorky, and Wolfgang Paalen, traveling far and wide to find especially provocative locations. It takes me from the wind-and-water eroded sandstones of Little Finland, NV, and Fantasy Canyon, UT, to the ice caves and frozen craters of Iceland. In these places I discover what Dalí called the “concrete irrational” in his own work, although my subjects are literally concrete.
My version of pareidolia, therefore, tilts toward the ironic and surreal. It embraces but is not limited to imaginary creatures, ancient ruins, bizarre fossils, grimacing masques, heavenly bodies, eroticism, architectural fantasies, grotesque homunculi, and ominous settings. It constitutes an in situ cabinet of curiosities—humorous, frightening, ironic—dispersed across the geological and glacial landscape. I have also discovered a particularly apt use of the fisheye lens for the ceilings of grottos (see last entry).
about the photographer
New Jerseyan by birth, a photographer since age 13, a professional for the past 12 years, my education was in literature, and I taught college English, French, Italian and jazz history over a 10-year period at various universities. I was also a jazz pianist for 22 years in New Orleans and in 1999 produced the Dick Hyman Century of Jazz Piano CD-ROM, an encyclopedic multi-media disk that sold world-wide. I've lived in France, and traveled extensively in Europe, the US and Canada. I'm almost completely self-educated in photography, but have worked as an art reviewer in New York. My influences include surrealism, Cartier-Bresson, Max Ernst, Dali, and many other photographers. I'm particularly interested in geology, prehistory, abstracts, refinements of the erotic, and catching people being themselves. I believe photography to be the most immediate medium for bringing back truths about other people's lives and the wider world. It can reveal convulsively beautiful aspects of nature, fleeting and otherwise. Obviously, it also preserves history that would otherwise be lost.back to gallery