Chris Wiley
11
2012
Chris Wiley, 11, 2012.
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20. In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.
Chris Wiley produces photographs that question how we experience our built environments. Trained in contemporary art theory, his practice interrogates notions of the real by subverting familiar tropes in architectural photography. His prints do not depict buildings and structures in their entirety. Instead, Wiley chooses to depict individual details and forms that are often lost in long-shot photography. His images deliberately flatten three-dimensional objects into dense composites of texture, color, and shape and heighten our attenuation to how we see the world around us, offering fragments of perceptual space that privilege sensory experience over narrative and form over content.