Verloren is a photo series that captures the disappearing tradition and personal touch of inscribing books. These earnest writings leave traces of relationships that happened and have now passed. The found inscription opens up your imagination about the dedicator and the receiver, like finding someone’s secret note. By analyzing handwriting you can also tell a lot about the wordsmith, from the tiny decorative cursive slanting right reveals the shyness of a young woman in love or the written precision of sage words of a poetic inscriber on a solemn book.

There is also a tension between the book title and what is inscribed; therefore the title of each image is the book title, Beau Ideal, The Gates of the Forest, Intra Muras etc. The images show the wear and tear of time and act like a silent memorial to a moment in two people’s lives that is now over. These books meant something to people at one time, to gift them, to write a personal message or advice, to perhaps cherish and now have been discarded.

Verloren

The Still Life series records some of the memories of an old building that is undergoing renovation in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin. A still life is set up each time a wall is going to be knocked down. Each still life is made from materials and other traces that have been left behind in the rooms of the house. The men knocking down the walls start on one side, and I stand on the other, filming the still life and protecting the camera from the falling debris. When watching the demolition it organically created a film set. The historical still life format of capturing slow decay became the medium to show rapid destruction. Original sound recordings have been edited to amplify the already existing ambient noises of the city going on right outside the windows of the house during the demolition. The life outside the window drowns out the life inside until everything settles once again.

The Still Life series

“Minds/Mines Don’t Care” is a series of photograms of I.E.D.s (Improvised Explosive Devices) and land mines. The photogram keeps the objects to scale and references the viewer’s physical presence. Simultaneously, the instant identification of what one sees has been reduced to a simple state.  It invites the viewer to question what they are looking at.  Current bombs are being made out of readily available materials, such as trash, cell phones, light bulbs, pens, water bottles—other items can be gathered with a quick trip to the hardware store. Similar to X-rays or early cyanotype photogram botany studies, these photos catalog the truth of the object. The X-ray quality plays with issues of paranoia and “Homeland Security.” In America, we are far removed from the realities of a suicide bomber, explosions in public spaces, and open land that has been embedded with mines. Contrasting elements of this work include the ideas of beauty, intrigue, fragility, mundane objects and the implied violence that is present in these weapons which link them to a maker.  In the end, it is the human mind that is the biggest threat.

The title derives from the U.S. military issuing country-specific land mine identification card packs. On the front of this pack is the iconic skull and cross bones with the slogan: “Be Aware Mines Don’t Care.”

Minds/Mines Don't Care

Circadian offers the participant an otherworldly experience. Upon first entering the space, the visitor encounters a light-filled white room. The Circadian rhythm is the biological process of the human body to naturally function on a twenty-four-hour cycle.  One of the strongest factors which alters this state is the abundance, or lack of, daylight. The 10,000 lux of full spectrum light in the room enhances the effects of sitting outside on a sunny day. The accompanying atmospheric soundscape is composed of several different audio layers of “white noise,” unidentified audio recordings from the ocean’s depths collected by researchers, other sound elements from nature and the human body, classical music and analogue audio players. The music is approximately 15 minutes in length and light therapy research has shown that this is the baseline amount of time people need to benefit from light exposure. The rhythmic and hypnotic sound in the room enhances the experience of this perceptual isolated solarium.

http://vimeo.com/13730696
https://soundcloud.com/rloyche/circadian-project-trier-2011

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Rebecca Loyche