“The vernacular leads to familiarity and that, in turn, leads back to us, the viewer, as we complete the photograph with our reception. Private and public memories stumble down the rabbit hole together.”
“I think what was really drawing me to Marina’s book was how it was animating this story of the mountains, their potential and actual destructive forces and how human lives are so dwarfed in the scale of that force yet so emotionally attached to life in the mountains.” – Sunil Shah
“Objects are malleable things – mutely concrete, or freighted with almost unbearable significance. Watkins’ photographs share this equivocality, wavering between documents and invocations.”
“It is as if we believe this concept of memory to be an organ unto itself, a strange piece of twisted tissue resting perhaps off to the side of the whole of the cerebral hemisphere…”
“There’s something unnatural and coercive about the idea of ‘making memories’. Surely memories can’t simply be fabricated at will? Forming a memory is something more organic, more random, and it’s all the more precious for this unpredictability.”
“The modern city engenders various pathologies, among them agoraphobia and claustrophobia – the one an intense anxiety felt in open spaces, the other, a panic brought about by confinement. Horizont channels both of these aberrations.”
“The Sentinel Script follows traditional sci-fi patterns in alignment with Kierkegaard or Nietzsche’s existentialist thoughts on our struggle with apparent meaninglessness and our position as individuals in a confusing and unsettling environment.” (GZ)
“From Lascaux forward, pictograms and other forms of cryptographs illuminated millennia of human beings who traversed their path well after execution and were understood as root forms of relative experience in image”
“Blue is the color of the unreal, of the memory, of the open mind, of the royal, the precious and the rare. Blue is the color of the absolute, the higher, the divine, of cold and of clarity. It is the color of Yves Klein, Derek Jarman, Picasso and Gerard David.”
“It is often confusing being an American. We are a country deeply concerned with our personal histories, yet there is something peculiar about all of this in so much as that it seems to deflect from what we actually are: American”
“I always imagine that it looks like a whisper would look if a whisper would wail.”
‘ATEM’ is to use photographs for what they really are, non-representational epitaphs of moments rendered in silver with little meaning.