Christopher Bennett

Artist accepts commissions.

STATEMENT

In Far Eastern traditions, one takes a humble journey to discover the world and eventually oneself. My practice runs parallel to this path. When exhibiting my work, I seek to create an immersive and sensory experience, transporting my own experiences and thoughts to the viewer. For me, photography is visual poetry; its ability to transcend time and place captures my attention. Capturing or representing reality are not my goals when photographing. Instead, the coexistence between the past and present, dream and reality, and absence and presence are what consumes me. During the passing of time and its surreal qualities and tensions between real and imagined, random moments are what I seek to convey in my work, taking the viewer elsewhere.

I do this by investigating concepts of space, place, time, and memory. This exploration allows me to explore how the environment in which I live and its history guides my views and perceptions. Thus, by studying historical aspects of a region and employing philosophical elements of the sublime and beauty in nature, I seek to inform and address my relationship’s ontological aspects to the world by examining my internal dialogue.

My examination of the sublime and beauty in nature sparked my influence by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s writings and the paintings of many Romantic period painters, including J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. Burke and Kant’s writings also influenced them. Through enigmas of nature, I try to understand my limits of the human condition by approaching the landscape around me, searching for some kind of answer. Nature’s obscurity and limitations also become my limits. My work will help viewers look at and experience the world and landscapes in a new way.