The Pain, Boredom, and Euphoria of Looking

For the exhibition, Joseph Podlesnik selected a mix of color and black and white photographs. His choices were driven by a desire to showcase a range of emotions and experiences he encountered while capturing the images. This included physical discomfort (particularly while taking a photograph titled “Cliff Face"), and the sense of boredom that sometimes accompanies the task of sorting through a world filled with redundant, irrelevant visual information. The artist also sought to highlight the euphoria he feels when capturing photographs and experimenting with their effects in post-processing. Podlesnik's ultimate goal was to achieve a sense of formal order, unity, mood, complexity, and ambiguity in his work, and to engage viewers in frame edge-to-frame edge visual activity.

From the artist:

“For me, the camera lens depicts perspective too easily, which is why I capture and develop photographs which often frustrate readable perspectival space, through glass and light reflections and refractions, bringing the viewer’s eye stubbornly back to the surface of the image, so the mind is not allowed to linger in readable/navigable space too long. For me, the photographic image is not only a window through which to see the visible world, but also a maker of flat surfaces which stunt or block logical space. I see photography and pictures not only as documentation, but as commenting on or reenacting visual perception itself."