Valerie Sparks
"Sitting between large scale photographic pieces and wallpapers, my work involves reconfiguring architectural spaces through constructing imaginary interiors and activating the surfaces of buildings. This involves making large scale works on paper using digital technology. The main source for this work is the utopian, hybrid landscapes of early colonialist scenic wallpaper. I am interested in the philosophical and aesthetic questions that these images raise, and what happens when they are recreated using photographic technology and new media aesthetics. Through shifts in perspective and pictorial space and use of new media I aim to engage with, and problematize these representations…
Each piece of work includes elements from disparate locations and different times of the day and seasons that are assembled to create a seamless, flawless and therefore impossible place. There are similarities between this process and those of colonialist artists who created images of exotic locations through sourcing material from different locations; the botanical sampling of the time. Through this strategy I hope to address the history of European representation of the landscape and nature whilst emphasizing this as a highly constructed, imaginary and fantastical process. The images look real and continuous but they can’t be; the light of the sun comes from different directions...
The new media interpretation resonates with early forms of immersive virtual reality such as dioramas, stereoscopic photography, and the creation of contained exotic environments in European glass houses and exhibition halls. As examples of early virtual reality, the wallpapers explored fantasies of travel, colonial expansion and a fascination with the exotic. They often collapsed geographical space and time through incorporating a variety of locations into a seamless continuous image of a European garden. The lush, seductive beauty of these decorative features is compelling.,,In the impossibility of these disturbing hyper-real environments, people are immersed in imaginary spaces between different forms of visual logic."
(Valerie Sparks 2007)
