Liminal Objects and Contingent Processes

In much of my recent photography, I am exploring the complex relationship between the photograph as image and the photograph as object existing in the material world, even while it often points to some version of that world. My interest lies not in simply—or only—challenging optical perception but to also raise ontological or phenomenological questions. Some of my work does more of the former, at least on the surface (as in the Prepared Shelves series), while some of it emphasizes the latter, as is the case with the following two examples.

Bryan Florentin
Constructed Material 3
2022
UV print on plywood
84 x 42 inches

Constructed Material 3 (detail)

For the first example, I was thinking of the common use of imaging technologies to produce a simulated wood veneer on plastic laminate, so I photographed the flat veneered surface of a sheet of plywood. Instead of producing fake wood made of plastic, I printed the veneer image at one-to-one scale directly onto the plywood I photographed; however, the wood grain/pattern in the image is at a right angle to the underlying actual wood. The 84" x 42" result is a composite of real plywood and a facsimile of it, plywood being already a manufactured product. Printing a transparent photograph onto the surface underscores the construct, as does the title Constructed Material, which is also a play on plywood's primary use as construction material. It also makes it both real and simulated, object and image. That gets to a related aspect of my work, indeed one that is integral to the ontological/phenomenological aspect: When does a photograph lose its identity as a photograph?

Accretion 3 (27,510 pages of elongated bleed)
2022
UV print on aluminum composite
84 x 42 inches

Accretion 3 (27,510 pages of elongated bleed) (detail)

In the second example, I photographed a single shelf full of tightly packed art periodicals on the page edge side (opposite from the bound side). I digitally stretched the pages to eight times their actual height but left the page thickness at its true size. The result is paper-thin lines seven feet high printed on a thin forty-two-inch-wide flat aluminum panel. What was approximately 27,510 pages of printed matter that could be held, opened, leafed through, read, looked at, and closed, is instead rendered as vertical lines on a rigid surface. The panel leans against a wall to emphasize that what used to have dimensional bulk has been transformed into a thin flat plane. Titled Accretion (27,510 pages of elongated bleed), the print is resolutely an object, but is it still a photograph when the real-world referent is no longer obvious?

Those two works are image-objects that are and are not photographs. As such, they are indicative of my expanded approach to photography that is at the core of my work. The Prepared Shelves series and related works draw from that core but take what appears to be a different approach. However, they still take an expansive view of photography in which the image, due to its sharpness and one-to-one scale, merges with the objects within the image due to a pronounced trompe l'oeil effect. And, like most my photography-based work, they are emphatically material objects in the physical world, instead of fugitive screen images in the virtual one.

The Prepared Shelves series features metal storage shelves filled with disparate objects and materials. The series is comprised of multiple subseries, most of which are a sequence of four photographs. What I place on the shelves and where is an intuitive process with chance playing an important role. As the series has progressed, the imagery has become more fragmented and chaotic even though the structure is spatially organized in the first two photographs of each sequence.

Prepared Shelves 4.2 (side 2)
2023
Inkjet print
36 x 34 inches

Prepared Shelves 4.3 (side 2 after crashing onto floor)
2023
Inkjet print
36 x 34 inches

The series title is borrowed from John Cage's Prepared Piano pieces in which he placed objects inside pianos to alter sound in unpredictable ways. For Prepared Shelves, the shelving and its contents are prepared for being photographed from two sides. More than that it is prepared for what happens next: I push it over, allowing it to crash onto a slightly inclined sheet of plywood on the floor, then I photograph the result from overhead. The photographs only show the top half of shelving that is in fact six feet tall. When weighed down with heavy objects, the collision with the plywood generates significant force. It's also loud. Allowing gravity and the collision to rearrange the elements introduces another element of chance. For one last overhead photograph, I remove the shelving and allow the contents to collapse further into disorder.

Perhaps most photographs, especially printed ones, are indexical; they point to things in the world but are themselves not those things. Maybe they are analogies. Either as index or analogy the Prepared Shelves series deals with fragmentation, chance, chaos, and attempts to bestow order or undermine it, all of which points to, or corresponds with, our collective contemporary condition.

Bryan Florentin's work has been exhibited at various venues nationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Something Tangible at Texas A&M University's College of Architecture in College Station and On or About the (Uncanny) Double "World" at Kirk Hopper Fine Art in Dallas. As Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Arlington, Florentin teaches courses in photography, photo history, and the history of LGBTQ art. He holds an MFA in photography from the University of North Texas and a BA in art and performance from the University of Texas at Dallas.