Christopher Koller
‟The general objective I have pursued in my work has been to address sets of ideas that have both a personal and a strong social relevance using photography and increasingly, the medium of digital video. I have developed new approaches through an engagement with ideas from a very broad range of disciplines including architectural, social and media theory. I endeavor to produce visually engaging works that provoke a strong immediate and even visceral experience at times, but that nevertheless offer up complex layers of meaning to extended and subsequent viewing.
Since the late 1980s I have been continuously compiling a series of photographs of gardens with a plastic camera, ranging from medieval cloisters to contemporary spaces, through which I have explored the meditative quality of nature arranged and controlled by designers and gardeners. In 1986 I spent some time in England retracing my unsettled postwar childhood to produce a series influenced by photojournalism but autobiographical in content, titled Before the Winter Gardens…
My body of work in colour titled Spatial Narratives, looked at the ways in which the organization of space and the kind of architecture produced in three cities was formed by the whole range of political, historical, technological and social changes…I wanted to show how the city is an artifact, built up as a series of layers that are like the sediment of political and economic power. I spent time in Milan and Mexico City adding two subsequent sections to this series.
Between 2001-3 I produced a series of video works on the theme of aberrant human behavior. These works explore different forms of aberrant behavior that are rooted in ordinary everyday objects and activities that are strangely and creatively worked into elaborate and bizarre behaviors by individuals who have been unable to conform to socially accepted norms..”
(Christopher Koller 2006)
