I · 3Extractions2022–

Extractions gives ordinary things the attention usually kept for specimens. A bus shelter, a stop sign tagged with graffiti, a mausoleum: each is photographed and then treated the way a natural history plate treats a beetle. Flattened, isolated, set out to be studied.

The method is borrowed from science, the subject from the street. Something passed every day without a second look is given the time of day and examined as if it were rare. Nothing about the object changes, only the seriousness with which it is regarded. That shift in attention is the work.

Some subjects are lifted clear of their surroundings; others are flattened together with them. The decision is made image by image. A strong colour photograph tends to lose its background and become a specimen outright. Black and white images, like the mausoleum, keep their setting, where clinical isolation would sit oddly.

Where Windows kept to one kind of thing in one city, Extractions widens to any object, in any city.