Artist Statement:

For my project I created 3 surrealist photographs using the backdrop of the campus,
normal photos of the campus buildings such as the dorms and school building itself. I
began by taking each Photo into Lightroom and messing around with the exposure in
order to brighten them, pushing the blacks and whites as well as contrast to give the
photos a sense of depth and finally bumping up the clarity t0 nearly 40 for all of them to
add grain and a sort of creepy feeling. Afterwards the photos went through multiple
iterations inside photoshop, with some experimentation with outlining and filling in
portions of the photos with flat colors and using custom RGB curves to create photo
negative like effects and sun spots. I wanted to create a series of pieces featuring a world
like no other, an alien landscape that seems as if the very ground were constantly
moving about. The subject of the piece is the scene as a whole, or really how you
perceive the scene, the emphasis was on the feeling you get while looking at the photos,
you’re meant to feel generally uneasy. I broke away from a lot of the normal symbolism
of traditional surrealists in two of my pieces, as the one with eyes can be considered
symbolic or more normal. The other two I decided I’d rather focus less on the
symbolism and meaning behind something like a dream and instead on simply how it
feels to be in a dream. That sense of being in another world, a different plane of reality,
the discomfort, vertigo, and hyper awareness. You know something isn’t right and it’s
obviously not with what you’re seeing but you can’t quite mouth it.

Surrealists:

-Joan Miro: Known for very colorful and imaginative scenes of his home mainly, my
main inspiration for the crazy colors present in my pieces.
-Yves Tanguy: ​Known for use of more naturalistic and realistic features in his
dreamscape pieces, I was inspired by the landscapes and world that were created in
Tanguy’s pieces, likely my biggest inspiration in terms of surrealism for my own pieces.
-​Frida Kahlo: ​known for extensive use of personal representation in her paintings, while
I didn’t derive any direct inspiration from her as I found it hard to include her themes in
my pieces they served as general inspiration for an overall idea.
-Salvador Dali: ​Considered a master of surrealism in his own sense, I was inspired less
by the content of his work but rather the feeling, the confusion they give off.
-Vladimir Kush: An artist known for fantastical scenes and landscapes more rooted in
reality and far less abstract than most other surrealists, I was inspired by his meshing of
different elements into one another and I attempted this to an extent in one of my
pieces.