• Laura Donohue - Statement | CV | Works

Laura Donohue
Artist Statement

The elements composed in this series of digital prints are abstracted by their displacement. The contradictory and confusing depth relationships, the overlapping perspectives and the distorted scale cause the images to lose their familiar associations thereby asserting their object-ness. There is an uncanny sense of the entire pictoral space being outside of time. This concentrated perspective more closely approximates the ‘all-at-once’ view of human vision and mental apprehension. It is as if the timelines of converging histories have been compressed and presented altogether.

This contradiction of the ordinary laws of physics within the picture is also a challenge to the limits of photography. The lack of an attempt to accurately depict gravity, depth or perspective as well as the extreme detail and scale short-circuit the realism of the situation –- alluding to hidden or separate realities. This implication points to photography’s lack of sufficient resolution and depth of field to fool the eye, ultimately failing our expectations. The disappointment of photography ironically most closely resembles the disappointment in our inability to remember clearly. Exploring this paradox, these works present memory as a layering of histories and places all occurring at once –- and even offers an unnatural feeling of remembering the future –- presque vu.