Studio Physics – A Photographic Exploration Into the Nature of Time Light Space and Gravity By John Chervinsky

I am fascinated by the concept of time. I can measure it, account for it in an experiment in the lab, and live my life in it, but I still don’t know what it is, exactly. The idea behind this, my latest project, is to extend the image capture interval from the standard click of the shutter to a period lasting for weeks. I shoot a straight still life and crop the resultant image. I then email a jpeg of the cropped section to a painting factory in China and have them make it into a painting. Meanwhile, my studio setup sits there, but change to it is occurring, the apples begin to rot, the flowers die and the mold advances. Eventually they send the completed painting back to me in the mail. I insert it into the still life, and re-photograph. As with previous work, I’m interested in issues relating to perspective. I’m interested in the tensions expressed in the comparison between reality vs. representation. I’m interested what happens when I collaborate with another artist that has no idea that they are involved in a collaboration, and I’m interested in seeing and expressing subtle changes over time that we might otherwise take for granted. When I make these images, I think about two different time scales: one that compares the weeks-long interval between the painting to the rest of the photograph, the other which is the age of a human (or humanity), to the age of the universe. My use of transient objects such as fruit or flowers is for similar reasons to what is found in Dutch still-lifes, but I would like the work informed with our current understanding of physics. Besides fruits and vegetables, I’m also photographing object that are squarely in the realm of physics, the motion of pendulums, prismatic separation of light, acceleration due to gravity, etcetera. To see more, have a look at www.chervinsky.org

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