Irby Pace

“I visualize how smoke can interrupt a landscape's natural space in an ever changing yet temporary manner. Physical spaces are altered with real, colorful clouds of smoke which are allowed to combine with nature. The space dictates the shape and duration of each cloud present, filling the voids of the urban and natural landscapes. These moments are captured to show the brief glimpses of change that each space creates. 

While allowing nature to take control of the element of smoke as a way to showcase the natural state of locations that are hidden and sometimes forgotten, I have moved on to experimenting with staging scenes to further explore how these natural spaces react. Surreal cinematic scenes in urban sprawls, abandoned spaces, and isolation with a melancholic banal narrative with suggestions of mystery are ways to blur the boundaries between the real and unreal.

With a reflective break from photography after a family tragedy, my work has shifted to pursue a moment through which I am now the unhinged storyteller. Rather than letting the environment take control, I am creating, or pushing, a space to find that perfect moment. 

Now inspired by the visual narrative work of David Lynch, George Miller, Spielberg, and Sherman my work is reaching for a heavily emphasized cinematic stylization through the use of on-set lighting and heavy post-process editing. Utilizing the emergence of catastrophe and the fascination of the strange, the work fixates formally on the thematic of using spatial banal environments and colorful smoke to showcase a momentary eclipse of engagement.

Photography has the capability to capture our most ephemeral experiences, especially those we encounter as viewers to otherworldly dimensions. During this time of global pandemic, the emotional and physical isolation of my work is emphasized adding to the bleak psychological realism of each image. This in turn, gives the viewer a portal to somewhere else in which iniquity has slipped through.”

-Irby Pace