-
- Leona Smyth
Leona
Smyth
Constructing Worlds / Visionscapes
It can be easy to allow preconceptions of a place such as Limerick to influence our experience of the city, particularly as an outsider. I take a phenomenological approach to urban wandering and photographing the city. The photographs I take are a natural response to a given space or object. From photographic exercises I assemble and construct new images. This allows me to confront the city in a liberating way. It is about offering possibility and creation, an alternate perception from the existing urban landscape without being completely representational. Constructions of buildings and objects make up the majority of this body of work. Initially it is the brutally raw and formal qualities, which I record from architecture.
Mundane objects, structures, shells, industrial design, urban landscapes offer potential for exploration. Much of these spaces are globalized, repetitive landscapes, which are familiar and widespread. I then reconstruct the images in the studio. These constructed images reflect sci-fi imagery and post-modern dystopian anxieties. I make new versions, new spaces, realities forming an alternate vision of the world.