Allen Furbeck

West Chelsea, NY

 

My thesis work consisted of photographs, as well as abstract painting and sculpture. I was interested in how the space between ways or working could mediate each individual way in itself. Since Princeton I have continued working in both painting and photography; not so much in sculpture, but I have spent a good deal of time balancing the abstraction with a practice of traditional representation.

 

The realm of photography has had the most dramatic changes during that time, and Digital photography is hardly the same that analog photography was. Perhaps most of all, the option to tweak various parts of the image in a way that was never possible in the darkroom makes digital photography more like a hybrid of photography and painting than an extension of analog photography itself.

 

For that reason, among others, I’m choosing to put up photographs both recent and from my undergraduate days in this show. In the older work, there is in addition to the photo's subject, a nod to materials and processes, presented matlessly, along with a black rectangle added intuitively and without a particular understanding at the time. Thinking on it since, the rectangle is an abstraction but also a result of the photograph without an imagistic subject. It is also the result of what would be an “exposure” of no time and no light.

 

My photos today are as much about time light and color as they are about subject. Time, color, spatial representation, the experience, both perceptual and emotional, of the viewer, and scale are all part of this process. Standing in front of it is almost gravitational at least emotionally and perceptually. It also twists space to the point where you can imagine seeing in many directions at once, something that many species other than ourselves can in fact do.