Thomson Dryjanski

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:01:46 -0400

Thomson Dryjanski is a Chicago based artist who received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011.

What are the forces at work in your photographs? Do you relate to them?

My work focuses on the marks people leave, usually unintentional ones, and how those are altered by time or inadvertent use. I’m also concerned with the drastic inwardness of urban living. I have this theory about the planar levels at which people in cities look. The dweller looks down, navigating by habit. The visitor looks up, navigating by signs. My work finds itself at street level, navigating by conscious bodily sensations.

We live in a time where anyone can be anywhere as anything (a drastic overstatement not concerned with the digital divide). I want to use my photographs to offer those same decontextualized, universalized experiences while instead grounding them in an attempt at tactility. We often forget how ocularcentric we are. I strive to make images you want to touch. I’m concerned that when we do create a fully sensual virtual experience, we will only partake through an apparatus of common denomination. I’m no different than anyone else. I’m not a Luddite- love my Internet, video games and smartphone. A deep world immersion in my practice offers me an escape, almost like the opposite of the isolation chamber.

Are you photographing what the world has to offer or what you have to offer?

It is a combination of both. I think through specificity you can create a greater universality. I don’t want to be of a place or time. I look, I wander, I take in. It’s always a gut reaction when I am photographing. I used to make this sexual metaphor about my camera and the world, with the world on the receiving end of my camera’s insertion. It was a large format bravado thing. Some time later, I think I am the one who is taking it.

I’ve started to feel that something is missing in my photographs, a 360-degree peripheral sensory experience. I think taking people on field trips might be a better way.

What do our ruins say about us? About our future? How are they unique?

For me, in the ruin lies an unrequited story. I love actions that are undertaken without the specified end being gratification. I was taking a walk by the lake and underneath a bush sat a nicely wrapped square present with a sparkling ribbon. I picked it up and it was just a brick with wrapping paper and a bow. I had to put it back for the sake of the next person to discover it. Absurdity for absurdity’s sake is wonderful. In that sense I find ruins and photographs to function similarly. An action undertaken with immediate consequence but an indeterminate outcome once you place it into the world. You let go of control.

I don’t think ruins are a prediction. They function more like a road map, ending at where you are standing. The ruin is going to keep changing and my photographs are simply encounters with a changing record at a specific moment.

They are unique in two ways. One, in their erosion they bear marks of all that affected them. Secondly, they are unique in experience, aura if you will. However, returning to my proposed field trips, the photograph attempts to stop that erosion momentarily. You can’t give that aura with our current technologies.

Where are all the people?

People usually misinterpret my camera as making a movie so they decidedly refuse to walk in front of it. More truthfully, I just find photographing people difficult on a multitude of levels. I can talk to anyone but have never felt that a translation of what I learned from them entered into the photograph. I struggle with gesture. Instead I would rather create an anonymous viewing form that the viewer can embody. People are great though. Never turn down a conversation.

What endures? What is one thing that does not endure that you wish could?

What a question. Diamonds. They endure. Cats don’t. I think about when my cat will die a lot. It is a ways off but I already feel the trauma.

Do you photograph with your brain or your heart?

Neither. I use my body. I photograph through habit and repeated encounter most of the time. Other times I will go searching. I grew up skating and one of my favorite parts of that was going hunting for new spots. It is this aimless activity where you are searching for something that you have no idea what it is, hoping to make something out of nothing. My practice is very much like that where I will spend hours searching and experiencing without ever making a single picture.

I start by choosing a zone, a region that I am attracted to. I then work to narrow down the reasons I feel seduced by this place. When I find that reason, I usually won’t photograph it immediately. I walk around it, not looking for an angle but trying to feel something. I’m the world’s worst divining rod.

Sometimes people talk about feeling bad about not making work over a period of time. I used to feel that but I came to a realization that I was always working. That skating mind, that way of looking at the world you will never turn off- my working mind is the same.

You photograph many traces or ghosts of activity and events, can you talk about that in relation to the photographs themselves?

I have this altruistic desire that I can bring you there with me. However, I have no belief that I can make the viewer DO anything. All that I have is this raw material I can offer to be fashioned into a pingback, a call and response song.

I love water, (I am a Cancer) and more specifically the feeling of being immersed in a large body of water. You are so out of control that you must simply submit to the larger flow. The ghost in the image is submitted to that larger flow and I recognize that there is nothing I can do to stop it. It will be far more attractive the next time I visit it and the time after that.

Ask yourself a question and respond.

What is your favorite personal ritual?

Before I can do any kind of stationary work, I have to clean and order my space. To answer these questions, I made the bed, swept the floor and reorganized the many library books I have for both research and a class I teach. I find that doing so brings me a sense of calm. If I don’t I am constantly finding a distraction to deal with, something I feel needs to be done. I still make my bed before I go to sleep, even if I am just going to get in right after.

www.thomsondry.com

novh: Massachusetts, 2012

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novh:

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tammymercure: Just a few favorites that have come across my...

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:51:07 -0400

Nick Jojola nhjojola.tumblr.com/

Steve Reczkowski ccsix.tumblr.com

Jessica Dean Camp jessicadeancamp.tumblr.com

Jacob Biba jacobbiba.tumblr.com

Aaron Canipe mysteriesmanners.tumblr.com

Thomas Prior thomasprior.tumblr.com

Jesse Untracht-Oakner juophoto.tumblr.com

John Hathaway johnluskhathaway.tumblr.com

Rob McDonald gourdtree.tumblr.com

Alan Hunter ahunterphoto.tumblr.com

tammymercure:

Just a few favorites that have come across my tumblr dash of late. Thanks for everyone on tumblr for being awesome.

Please check out: nhjojola.tumblr.com, ccsix.tumblr.com, jessicadeancamp.tumblr.com, jacobbiba.tumblr.com, mysteriesmanners.tumblr.com, thomasprior.tumblr.com, juophoto.tumblr.com, johnluskhathaway.tumblr.com, gourdtree.tumblr.com, ahunterphoto.tumblr.com

JESSICA DEAN CAMP

Thomson Dryjanski

novh: Massachusetts, 2012

David Luraschi vs. Jessica Dean Camp

Heidi Johanson VS. Cole Don Kelley

Heidi Johansen

Elizabeth Bick

Elizabeth Bick

Elizabeth Bick

Elizabeth Bick

Elizabeth Bick

Elizabeth Bick

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

Sadie Wechsler

tammymercure: Just a few favorites that have come across my...