Illuminating the Moment

"...the art of photography is imagining:"I could have had this encounter with the world". That's what I get excited about. That's what photography does. It's very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's the art of limitation. Framing the world. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in. With photography you have one little moment and you allow everyone else to fill it in." (Alec Soth in Image Makers Image Takers, London: Thames Hudson, 2007, p.185)

우민정_Illuminating the Moment #001-3_100×150cm_2012

우민정_Illuminating the Moment #001-1_디지털 프린트_100×150cm_2012

우민정_Illuminating the Moment #003-1_디지털 프린트_80×120cm_2012

우민정_Illuminating the Moment #005-1_디지털 프린트_74×110.6cm_2012

Studying photography as part of a wider course in fine art, I wanted to open my mind to different approaches by considering and utilising the best methods used in other artistic disciplines and applying the ideas they gave me to the photographs I took. This exhibition allows me to illustrate not only individual pieces of my work, but also the relationship between them when displayed in different styles - both a simple style on the wall and an alternative style inside bottles on an acrylic cabinet - which reflect my ability to manipulate and recompose my images and how the viewer might perceive them. Furthermore, I specifically designed the acrylic cabinet to reflect my interest in the core themes of my work - windows, reflections, public space and geometric patterns, particularly the rectangle. The combination of photographs, bottles, the cabinet and the space present a much larger synthetic work of art.

우민정_Illuminating the Moment_디지털 프린트, 병, 아크릴 캐비넷_200×100×21cm_2012_부분

우민정_Illuminating the Moment_디지털 프린트, 병, 아크릴 캐비넷_200×100×21cm_2012

The aim of my photographs is not just to be a depiction of reality, but also to show a kind of second reality - the image of the image. The atmosphere of the gallery changes from moment to moment. It is a captured time where the boundaries between the real and the illusion become ambiguous and overlap. I am not interested in the direct reflection of reality, but in the image – generating a manipulative character of the photographic medium. In the same way that a painter uses a brush on their canvas to create a narrative, I used the white wall or window within the galleries as my own canvas, and my camera to explore the lighting, colour, gradation, reflections and geometric patterns that enriched the scene and the gallery space as I explored it. I was interested in the relationship between these elements and their effect on the artwork that I photographed in its context. Choosing the camera angle and position gives me control over the context and how the image might be perceived. ■ WOOMINJUNG

Vol.20121127j | 우민정展 / WOOMINJUNG / 禹旼廷 / photography.installation