Jack Kemper
Ambling Lines, 2021
Digital photography
16 x 24 inches each
Strolling through my streets, I have created an abstract narrative in 10 images based around a walk of the sorts I’ve been going on to get to know my neighborhood recently. The narrative is episodic, following a nearly aimless jaunt through my neighborhood, lacking any sort of traditional story arc - calling it a “narrative” is even a stretch. Instead, it relies on the emotive expressions I illustrate through each of my pictures and the patterns of their compositions. My initial creative process follows a flexible structure, a loose, spontaneous storyline that I refuse to put any conscious thought toward planning. Expressive, artistic instincts and the gestures I can push together into a two dimensional plane when I angle my camera just the right way. But the expressions my viewfinder discovers come just as much from that city around me as the landscape within. Even in the time of coronavirus, I’ve found a way to learn from my city, taking these hours-long walks nearly every day to explore the minute details of all my surroundings. I encounter a new home behind each street corner, a new family around every park picnic table, a new perspective in every moment I spend in my city.
There are certain times of day when all the light in my neighborhood just falls into this perfect balance. I first noticed it walking around about an hour before the sun set, as the day’s final light flooded through the leaves of the trees to form spotlights all across the ground. I see every object cast in a sort of vague glow, beckoning my eyes, beacons to my senses. Each piece of my surroundings calls out to me. In their spatial symmetry and chaos, they construct the lens through which I understand everything in my life. A lens that covers my whole vision, unveiling emotive perspectives beyond my basic intellect, tuned up to my world. Forging a calm connection with each detail, my eyes are drawing sketches through the scenery. They catch the intricacies filling each grass blade and cement crack, each shadow careening over windows past. I need not sift through wires and signs to find my parallel lines: the shapes all sing to me. Some abstract geometry steps into focus as I slip into the groove, the aesthetic web winding the pictures together. I study every line, every texture quilted across the shapes. I sweep everything around me, scouring, devising a puzzle for my camera through the chaos, Puzzle pieces sliding across each other into a symmetry, doodling through the lines sighing beneath my feet.
The geometry spills in drops over my head, vanishing into mist before my eyes. It floats off into the atmosphere’s horizon, growing emptier with each passing image. After the first two introductory photos (two displays of my photos’ expressive compositions and strange settings), each consecutive photo in my walk reveals more of the sky; that endless blue negative space fills more and more of my frame as my series progresses. As I slowly filter out the darker landscapes and house-side drain pipes, that abstract emotive geometry steps out into the spotlight, foregrounded in any audience’s experience of this series. Every photo in my project arranges its composition over a map of expressive lines in the form of all that geometry I see shifting around me. I use those abstract patterns to create graphic expressions, almost akin to the faces of portraits, breathing life into still scenes through the lines,
The lines in my eyes, strolling through the shapes in my street.
Click images to enlarge.
