In her newest photo series Response, Laura Plageman focuses on the materiality of the photographic print. Visiting popular scenic destinations along the California coast, Plageman took photos of recognizable landmarks for her first generation of images. She then ripped, folded and sculpted the images into tabletop assemblages and re-photographed them, exploring the relationships between the process of image making, the representation of landscape, and photographic truth and distortion.
Plageman observes that the places she visits often feel object-like themselves in the way they are experienced and recorded, continually changing shape through the forces of nature and human impact. These perpetual new renditions of the natural world are characterized in her pieces by subtle distortions in the composition; discernible in crumpled horizons, ripped landscapes, and impossible swells of water.
Plageman’s prints hover between reality and a dreamy interpretation of the landscape; each has a bit of truth and fiction. The photographic series is a cumulative record of her observations over time and space, and reminds us that boundaries ceaselessly shift and things constantly change.
Written by Alex Winston
See more work from Laura Plageman : www.photolp.com