House

At first glance, it looks like an eerie still from a Tim Burton film. A gothic sprawling house with precarious, pokey turrets perches uneasily on a desolate dock. Jagged rocks loom in the foreground beside a ragged highway, as a flock of black crows suspiciously hovers in the air. They might even dive bomb at any given minute. There’s a burning pier in the distance – clouded by thick black smog. It’s all a bit disturbing and disorientating, yet somehow magnificent and awesome. A wonderfully atmospheric, but horribly haunting, landscape. You wonder where this place is, who set the pier alight, and how the house hasn’t crumbled into the sea. In short, you’re scratching your head in utter confusion (well, this was my immediate reaction anyway) wondering what the hell is going on. Or, to be more precise, what hell is going on.

But then you peer closer and it all becomes clear. Well, sort of clear. Despite appearances, this photo (simply entitled "House") cannot be a photo at all. For starters, you realise that the fairytale house is an impossibly layered mansion of chimneys, windows and porches that structurally defies reality. This is not reality, nor is it a Tim Burton-esque still. No, this is just one of artist Jim Kazanjian’s many surreal, swindling landscapes. Designed to fool you. And you were fooled by the tricky thing. To label his work as photography would be misleading. You see, Jim’s a bit of a meanie (and a magpie… let’s call him a meanie magpie) – chopping and changing photos from his huge archive and digitally reassembling them into deliberately realistic landscape prints. His mission? “To defamiliarise the familiar” in photography. I genuinely shudder at these words (anyone who studied English Literature will understand my pain) – so to translate from Pretentious to Nutshell, he basically asks us to question today’s mass digital photography by confusing us with something that seems authentic. And he definitely succeeds. His work is a series of fascinating collages, both impossible and impossibly real. It’s all a bit apocalyptic in Jim’s imaginary world: houses regularly seem to implode upon themselves and he’s a big fan of monochrome graphics and sci-fi elements. It’s intriguing. In a world of endless digital photos, where even the most ridiculous can be made to seem real, this is brilliantly conceived art that makes you peer that little bit closer. Jim, you meanie magpie, just two words. Mission accomplished.

http://www.kazanjian.net/