Weekend Portfolio: Kovi Konowiecki
And In Its Place, Another
The photographs in And In Its Place, Another were taken between 2016 and 2020 in the Middle East, Mexico, greater Los Angeles and the California desert. The images were created in a much less formal way than most of my other work. Rather than setting out to photograph a particular place or group of people, I started piecing together photos from my many travels to the Middle East and Mexico, as well as photos I was taking near home in California. I started noticing many similarities amongst the work I was making— similarities in composition, form, texture and subject matter, and I continuously asked myself if there was something that pieced these photographs together on a deeper level. I kept coming back to the idea of borders. Not just the physicality of the border though, but also abstract and internal notions of the border. It became apparent to me that there were strong visual connections present in the work that stimulated ideas about place.
Rather than trying to formally divide the work into chapters that show these different geographical borders I encountered throughout the making of this body of work, I decided to create one long stream of consciousness; something driven by my emotions and my intuition— the same way the creation of this project began. Despite the political realities of many of the communities present in the work, my approach to this body of work is quite distant from the idea of border politics. The goal is for the viewer to travel through the work, moving from place to place, without really knowing where they are and where they are going, but simultaneously feeling grounded to these ‘borderland nowhere places’. In this sense, there is a strong sense of motion and migration taking place throughout the work. The idea of the borderland becomes more of an idea than a particular place. It can be an emotion, it can be an object, it can be a feeling. It is a place that feels like nowhere but anywhere.
Rather than being a project about place however, And In Its Place, Another became a project about emotion and visual association of the fringes. There is a constant negotiation of light, shadow and time that bring together the photographs and the various open-ended narratives present in the work. Throughout the project, people and objects oftentimes resemble one another through their shapes and composition. In some instances, elements of certain photographs disappear and then reappear as completely different figures or forms. Other times, things slightly change forms or degrade completely over time. Through these various forms of repetition and experimentation, the project became a way to explore my own visual and conceptual borders, and challenge some of the preconceived notions I had about my work, my practice, and my relationship to photography.
As the project took form, the various geographies that I initially examined began to melt into the geography of the project itself, where people and objects no longer belong to any particular space or place, but rather blend together to form the world of the project and spaces they occupy-- whether that be the exhibition wall or the book. The photographs that make up the project could be nowhere or anywhere, creating a world that exists on the outskirts and fringes of what we associate as place.
And In Its Place, Another also examines the relationship between people and nature-- how humans disrupt the natural world around us, and conversely, how nature overtakes humans. The work is made up of liminal spaces of desolation with signs and remnants of human intervention-- like a human pedestrian sign resting in the middle of untamed plants and weeds, or a construction pipe attached to a base of concrete in place of a tree trunk. We are reminded of the unblemished natural world that is oftentimes in between our journeys between places, the physical elements of the spaces around us that are oftentimes neglected. The photographs show the world we don’t often see; the things that are apparently not so pretty, but that can be quite beautiful when you start to scratch below the surface.
And In Its Place, Another was published by Deadbeat Club Press in July, 2021.
To see more work, please visit here.
