Dreams, Delusions and Other Traffic Circles

“Dreams, Delusions, and Other Traffic Circles” is a series of contemporary surrealist still lifes. The photographs in this series are narratives of objects in ambiguous relationships, interesting juxtapositions and troubling non sequiturs. In many ways they are more surrealist than they are still lifes.

The ‘wallpaper’ is the element that runs throughout, demonstrating that the scenes happen on a set. The background is powerful, it distracts from the ‘actors’ on the ‘stage,’ the ‘stars’ of the ‘story.’ There is no obvious or hidden relationship between the players on the set and the wallpaper. Sometimes they relate but most of the time they clash with nothing in common, nothing to do with each other except that I have chosen to put them together. This is the tension and the drama.

Max Ernst defined the structure of the surrealist painting as “ [the] linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.” This is a good description of my photographs in this series.