DREAM GARAGE
family photographs and other fictions

If this story were easy to put into words, I wouldn't be chopping up cars to create some kind of crazy metaphor to explain it.

The Dream Garage project of photo-based constructs represents a personal journey into the past; a search for genealogical roots and the conflicts involved in that endeavour. Crushed car parts from automobile salvage yards are combined with images of the biological family that gave me up at birth in a physical portrayal of the collision of two intimate worlds, of a tale twice-told. The final resting place for the work will be an automotive salvage yard where the pieces will remain outside, exposed to the elements, to erode and decay in an iteration of the life cycle.

One day passing a car graveyard in Vermont I was struck by the pervasive phenomenon of junkyard cars in the landscape. This point I began to think about the kind of image I could use in relation to these unpredictable shapes. I started to enlarge family snapshots using pictures of the people who reared me, my parents, and those of the biological family that gave me up at birth. The process of putting these diverse fundaments together was strangely satisfying. Only after a period of time did I realize that the project, gratifying at the visual and tactile level, activated something deeper in my sub-conscious.

My search initially was for edges, limits and demarcations. I began to experiment with the idea of frame using old windows, screen doors, plates and lampshades as underlying structures for photographic images. In the next phase of experimentation I looked for more irregular surfaces and shapes to serve as armature rather than as frame; surfaces and shapes that would allow the image to transcend or break out of the traditional limits of the frame. I thought about the hulls of ships and the Bernoulli curve of airplane wings.

The strength of the constructions lay in the synthesizing of contradictory and unexpected worlds of form and content, object and surrounding landscape to create a complex image larger than the sum of its parts. The singular notion of edge as limitation became, rather, the notion of edge as a place of discovery and provocation. In the process individual limits were transcended, the whole becoming a metaphor for the discontinuities and inconsistencies of life.

HOPE HERMAN WURMFELD