Statement

I'm going to post two groups of pictures for two projects I've been working on for the past year, after which point I'll start just posting contact prints as I make them on an approximately bi-weekly basis. Here's an artist statement loosely about those two incomplete bodies of work, one about suburban trees and one about suburban night.

STATEMENT

What are you doing on my lawn?

I was born in suburban Michigan, half a world away from homelands my parents never seemed to miss. Among the endless rows of houses and flat highways, my face is a face without any history, of one always slightly on the outside. And this is not to say that this vague place, this middle of nowhere America, is not my home, that I do not love its comforts and its nurturing, but that this is an uneasy love. My vision of home is a place where the inhabitants linger just out of view.

As I wander down these streets, I see these pictures of unease, of dark roads where lights dance from impossible corners, of lawns organized in martial discipline, where trees slowly war with their estranged brothers, the telephone poles. When I stop to make a picture, it’s an elaborate ritual, a process of staring and adjusting, balancing a clumsy camera on a tripod, and squinting at a ghost image flickering on glass. Then the shutter clicks with a clockwork flick, and light etches the beginnings of a picture onto the film.

Chemistry conspires against my eyes in the dark, bending the imprint of light waves into impossible colors, details that can't exist. The camera sees a world where lights paint the shadows, where any fleeting impression can be possible and real. It is from this revealed world that my pictures emerge, colors pulled in every direction and hidden shadows illuminated.

These are the pictures that tell the stories I love: of people uneasy and unsure of their welcome, of those who are safe and clean, yet bored and alone--the outliers. Stories of people who don’t quite belong in the American suburbs, wandering alone in the middle of roads as cars pass by with quizzical faces. These are the glances an insomniac steals, standing quietly off in the shadows, at houses glowing with eerie light, protected against the outside. These pictures are the feeling of walking home in the last hour before sunrise.

Andrew Ti, 2005