Drawing-Photography Project: Ventures Through The Fog (Patreon)

Hi! It's been a while since I've been on here, but I wanted to show what I've been up to in art school this semester.

The assignment was related to the concept of "Imagined Geographies"; photography used to construct myths and different narratives about space that aren't necessarily grounded in reality.

As my own take on the topic, I took a personal experience of a bike-ride through the fog in my hometown and imagined different kinds of entities that might exist in a sort of liminal space when the fog is present.

The resulting editing of my photographs created a digital "fog" as it were, posterizing the images and making them shades of gray like the cloudy fog I saw during that day. It creates a background where the subjects I imagine in the images are more believably placed/displaced through their strange characteristics and "cartoon-like" rendering.

The narrative I tell throughout the series has some elements based in reality - such as the clanging chain in the park I heard as well as seeing ducks swim along in the lake and my phone's battery dying while I was out taking the photographs.

I wanted to blur the lines between fiction and reality as I felt them blur with my imagination in the fog, creating ideas of ghosts and extraplanar entities and the ending of the series showing a photo from a different day with a more symbolic reference to the rest of the photos.

In the last photo, a sunset breaks through clouds overhead with lights across the sky, as opposed to the rest of the photos where there isn't any sunlight or open sky. The fog lifts with the quickly changing Manitoba winters and the reader of the series is taken back out of the liminal space, but the text overlaid creates a lingering feeling that the imagined creatures now linger in the fog of the reader's own mind.

It was fun to think of the different creatures and scenarios for the photographs, and I might continue with the idea into a sort of narrative later on. The project let me explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, clarity and confusion, active imagination and passive anxieties.