scapes

scapes by Amanda Jolley is an ongoing series of large digital images of built-up, broken down, and altered landscapes that draws from their personal visual history with the American landscape. In this body of work, Jolley pulls from both their analog and digital photographic archives to search for new and compelling connections between the physical objects they make in real space and the photographic images  they capture, break apart, and reassemble in digital space.

This work remixes fragments of the American landscape – fields of kudzu, pebbles on the beach, mountains and forests – to create large-scale images that are part photographic collage, part textile surface, and part sculptural assembly of objects in digital space. This series of landscapes is also aesthetically anchored in the idea of the surface: the surface tension of the photographic print, the excess and confusion of the decorative surface, and the beauty of the expansive natural surface gone haywire with texture and detail.

The innovation in this series lies where the images created break away from conventional ways of using digital image editing tools and seek out new possibilities for experiencing digital worlds and landscapes. Instead of using tools like Photoshop to create illusionistic fantasy worlds, Jolley’s goal is instead to better understand and work with the existing structure and potential of the landscape captured through the camera lens.

This body of work was supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Fund For Art at the Frontier. Special thanks also to Jamie Gruzska and Vincent Zeng from Carnegie Mellon’s Photography department and Kellie Hames, Phillip Scarpone, Tom Hughes, and Golan Levin from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art.