Lisa Levine

SOMEWHEREIn this series I am working with the notion of place. My sense of the places I know and the places I discover is constructed from an amalgamation of different sights and experiences over time. The works in this series are complex compositions that describe fragments of information, time, and space. I combine these fragments to formulate my impression of a place because I find that no one image alone can describe the sensation of place for me. I must construct it from multiple parts of my experience. I have devised a method of drawing with digital photographic information that I use to layer image upon image as I build up the surface of the image. ; Often an image will be buried within the work, only hinting at its form. It is these layers, each with their traces of objects that intrigue me. They are a way of covering and uncovering, a way of seeing and then seeing again. I use a flattened perspective so that multiple views and locations are densely compressed within a complex surface. The picture plane becomes a vibrant, kinetic space where many different views come together in a landscape without perspective. The industrial landscape, power plants, shipyards, shipping ports and vibrant cities are most appealing to me. These places have a unique aesthetic, sense of color, and rhythm that I find fascinating. TopographiesIn the Topographies works I have also used the grid as a point of departure. Here, the nature of these fluid constructions presents a discourse of contradictions- micro and macro, time and timelessness, and the containment of things that cannot be contained, movement that cannot be stilled. The grid lends geometry and so tends to "rationalize" or abstract what would otherwise be mainly pictorial. I am filling a vast expanse, a kind of landscape, without perspective. I refer to the idea of topography, a description or an analysis of a structured entity showing the relations among its components, as a format in which I can keep small details and still make a space that could go on and on, like the ocean itself. When we look at the world we assemble small views into a large idea like "the ocean.” We can't see it all at once; at least not the way we know it. My views construct the whole from its parts.