After looking closely at these photographs, viewers will quickly discover that there is something a little odd about each landscape. Created by California-based photographer Laura Plageman, the ongoing series, Response, features a confusing blur between reality and the artist's creation of fictional scenes.
For each piece, Plageman rips, folds, and sculpts original images together and arranges them on a tabletop to be re-photographed. Through her unusual manipulation and creative perspective, the artist produces the illusion of new and unique places.
Subtle distortions reveal themselves in the form of a rip across the composition or a crumpled section of paper while other, more obvious, changes are evident in large sections of missing landscape or curled horizon lines that seem surreal. According to her bio, “[Plageman] is interested in making pictures that examine the natural world as a scene of mystery, beauty, and constant change–transformed both by human presence and by its own design.”
The series is currently on display at De Soto Gallery in Venice, California, through November 9, 2014.
