|
Sophia Chai is a Korean-born artist, who lives and works in New York City. She received her BA in Chemistry from the University of Chicago and her MFA in Photography from University of Illinois at Chicago. This summer she will be participating in an exhibition, El Globo de Juan #2 in Braga, Portugal.
My approach to photography has been inspired by the embodied experience the camera offers as a phenomenological site. In creating compositions for each photograph, I extend this idea to my studio space where the interior surfaces of the room become akin to projection surfaces inside a camera obscura. The situations I create for my photographs are comprised of limited material: black tape, white walls and floor, and myself in a red dress. I study very closely how the camera utilizes one-point perspective system to organize a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane in order to address the relationship between depth and flatness. My method of deconstructing the one-point perspective of the camera, therefore, is not mediated by a digital manipulation or a construction of a new camera, but lies within a mode of perception already in existence.
The project initially began as an exploration of figure/ground relationship in photographs as an attempt to abstract the figure by addressing the ground. The work has evolved since, and I am looking more closely at different layers of relationships I can build through the act of repetition. I feel a kinship towards an idea of a scientist who repeats the same experiment over and over again, uncovering subtle differences amongst the same results she arrives at.
