Statement
Digital Dérive is a photographic series providing a light-hearted speculation on the role of the flaneur or street photographer during a period of travel restrictions and lockdown. Its convoluted recursive image-making process, combining found imagery from Google Street View and an array of six rudimentary projectors, allows the work to bounce between digital, analogue and digital again, muddying the relationship between the original referents and the final works. The distorted imagery creates a surreal, uncanny and nostalgic mood, especially as Street View necessarily provides users with a snapshot of locations at prior points in time. The works in ‘Digital Dérive’ evoke ideas of familiarity and alienation, inside/outside dichotomies, and the potential for screens to act as windows. Visually, the images are dream-like and whimsical, and maybe a bit empty or hollow, as if something is always missing.
Artist Bio
Paul Sutherland is a photographer and artist based in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). At the core of his practice, Sutherland is concerned with photography in the expanded field, working diversely between print, photo-sculpture, video, performance and affective installation. Sutherland aims to produce work inviting the audience to think a bit deeper about what it means to photograph or be photographed, and what the limits could be of the photographic medium. At the same time, Sutherland maintains a recognisably dreamy and ambiguous aesthetic in his photographic print work, utilising various recursive image-making processes as a significant creative methodology.