Petra Karadimas
"Jimmy"
Petra Karadimas
New York, New York
"From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989, photography was dead--or,
more precisely, radically and permanently displaced--as was painting 150
years before."
William J. Mitchell - The Reconfigured Eye, 1992
The computer revolution that is currently underway is increasingly
changing and shaping the way we conduct our lives, the way we educate or
entertain ourselves, the way we work. In addition, the computer has also
grown into a powerful new art medium--a development with considerable
ramifications.
Like photography in the past century, the digital medium raises a host of
questions, in particular with regard to photography itself. In the past
photography's claim to reality largely depended on the camera as a more-or-less truthful recording device, a condition now seriously compromised by the computer's enormous image-editing capabilities. Given the ease and
sophistication by which photographs can now be manipulated, photography,
and our understanding of it, cannot possibly remain unchanged.
My work is concerned with a changing notion of space and reality as
precipitated by the digital imaging revolution. I believe that (digital)
photography both affirms and denies reality. It affirms reality by
convincing us that something exists (which has now been documented); it
denies reality by making us face its mutability. My work consequently
tends to operate on a borderline--an ambiguous space between illusion and
reality, between recognition and non-recognition, between what is revealed
and what is concealed. More specifically, I am interested in different
modes of representation and the tension or contradiction that becomes
apparent when they are forced to coexist.