Perception // Disconnection

Project Statement 

Dustin Shores MFA and Andy Hayt, MA in Art History are interested in exploring the inherently fractured nature of image production and consumption in the contemporary moment as a means of reformulating the relationship between the artist, viewer, and object. The images in this exhibition are the result of Shores’ photographic interrogation of the urban environment in Tucson, Arizona. Hayt has selected and sequenced a series of images as a means of articulating our concerns.

Collaborative Two-Person Exhibition with Art Historian Andy Hayt, Perception // Disconnection, Graduate Gallery, Tucson, AZ (2017)

Perception // Disconnection

I explored Tucson Arizona as a space for photographic interrogation. My purpose was to photograph intuitively as I moved through the urban environment. At the end of this process, I have a resulting set of images that can be used to facilitate concept generation.

I am interested in the inherently fractured nature of photography. For this project, I sought to detach myself from image selection and concept production. Andy Hayt selected and sequenced the images, and offered further concept generation. What does it mean as an image maker to give up my agency and allow for others to reconstruct meaning and purpose from my work? Thinking of the malleability of meaning in photography, I find this methodology engaging in the development of a contemporary art practice. As a collaborator working within this interdisciplinary mindset, I believe that this process results in a conceptually rich and layered body of work.

Dustin Shores

Deconstruction // Reconnection

“The phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world, of a global social praxis that has split up into reality on the one hand and the image on the other.” – Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

It seems that for the photographer, working in the contemporary moment, with an awareness of the challenges to the practice resulting from decades of theoretical browbeating, there is no clear path to the production of images that may affect a shift in perception. Dustin Shores, in this series of photographs which are the result of an adherence to an intentional, yet loosely defined path through an urban space, has produced a body of work that questions the situational interactions that exist between the viewer and the environment. Shores shakes off the notions of spectatorship associated with a practice that has effectively visualized its own conclusion through the act of embracing autonomy in the form of images that ultimately construct false realities. The series provides, instead, pairs of images that encourage reorientation on the part of the audience, utilizing familiar modes of seeing as a means of breaking down the space between photographs and lived-experiences. The disconnection between perception and comprehension, formed by highlighting the breakdown of the relationship between traditional signs and signifiers that define contemporary ways of seeing, is a situational construction that forces reconsideration and perceptual alteration, resulting in an experience of spaces and objects that is predicated upon an immediate and unmediated connection between the photographer, the viewer, and the image.

Andy Hayt

Andy Hayt, MA in Art History from the University of Arizona. He also received his BA in Art and Architectural History from the University of Arizona. His research interests focus on the moments of intersection between architecture and photography from 1839 to the present, and the manner in which these instances of overlap function to construct an archive of the built environment.