William Stanley Merwin

Robert ParkeHarrison

Robert ParkeHarrison creates constructed photographs which tell stories of loss, struggle, and personal exploration within landscapes scarred by technology and over-use. He attempts to metaphorically and poetically link his laborious actions, idiosyncratic rituals and strangely crude machines into tales about our modern experience. The mythic world he creates mirrors our world, where nature is domesticated and controlled. The scenes display futile attempts to save or rejuvenate nature. His 'everyman' character patches holes in the sky, creates rain machines, chases storms to create electricity, communicates with the earth to learn its needs. Within these scenes, he creates less refined, less scientific, more ritualistic and poetic possibilities to work with nature rather than destroying it. The nature of his images and the process of their construction are interdisciplinary, embodying aspects of theater, sculpture, and painting, photography and performance. None of the images are real in the factual sense, but they are treated as precious talismans of a lost moment, a documented super-reality, whose message, like that of a myth, transcends the small realities of the day to day world.

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