Artist Statement Olivia Lahs-Gonzales
	The work I have pursued in the last 15 years has centered around the investigation of our dichotomous relationship with nature. The images, taken in domestic gardens and areas designated as “nature reserves,” have often been large-scale close-up photographs of organic subjects that are meant to both invite and repel the viewer. Photographs are capable of engaging the viewer both intellectually and physically, and to this end I frame my images without mats to better enable the viewer to interact with, and be drawn into the scene. I use limited depth of field and selective focus as “psychological triggers” to evoke the small and often terrible dramas that that occur beneath our feet and just outside our scope of vision.  In some of the work I am inspired by the ideas of the “Sublime” considered by Romantic painters of the 19th century -- however it is a secular sense of the beautiful and the terrible that I try to evoke in the photographs.  Bodies of work in this series have included Edenic Fictions/Insidious Realities and Imagining Wilderness. With these images I try to subvert the boundary between reality and fiction. The photographs are not a substitute for a real encounter with the wilderness, but are merely representations that, like our experiences, are culturally affected.  My hope is to render the mysterious beauty that is created through the collaboration between optical and physical “realities.” Inherent in these photographs is also a critique of traditional representations of nature. They are meant to run counter to “Sierra Club” calendar images that transform nature into safe, accessible consumer products. The way we think about nature is mediated by commercial and literary representations, and I am interested in communicating the tension that the camera creates between our perception of the natural world, and our interpretation of it. Other past projects have included work with video, a webcam project and experiments with a digital QX3 microscope/camera.  My work in video is an extension of my work in still photography, but creates a real-time experience in which the viewer is moved through a dimensional space. Similarly, the goal is to create an experience in which the mysteries of the garden are heightened. In the QX3 project, made with a digital toy microscope that captures images in 10x, 60x and 200x onto a computer -- I move deeper into places we cannot ordinarily visit. Although the microcosm has already been made familiar to us through photomacography, the idiosyncratic qualities of the QX3 technology transforms rational documents into worlds of wonder.  Another recent project involves the use of a webcam in my garden.  The camera documents the progress of my garden as it grows through the seasons.  Brought visually closer through technology in these projects, we are still separated from the “natural” world by many layers that include the unique qualities that optics bring to bear on a scene and the effects of the translation of visual matter from analog to digital, and back again in the final print. The vagaries of this low-resolution technology – the color shifts, blurs and pixellation – comprise part of the work’s meaning as a metaphor for our continued and growing separation from nature and our reliance on, as Baudrillard’s prescient words have aptly described our world today, “the precession of the simulacra.”