Sam Murray

I have printed these images in a way that reflects our connection with nature that I am working around and bringing up for discussion. The images on the tops of the pairs are cropped in harsh squares to reflect man's love for perfect angles and clean lines to keep him sterile and separate from the environment. They are also printed larger to talk about our domination of our natural world below. The bottom images are printed with very high contrast to burn out the sky and create a natural edge that allows the image to interact more with the page. With all of this I hope to emphasize our need to stop placing ourselves above nature and instead intermingle and coexist in the space between us and it all.

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We best display our ignorance of nature
when the only life we allow in the spaces
and environments we add to this world is our own.

I’m trying to work in this place between people and nature and it’s continuing to confuse me the more I try to understand it. Overall I want to capture the sense of neglect, to understand the sad way our society has slowly come to put ourselves ahead of everything.

We have spent so much time ‘progressing’ more and more, with little thought about the side effects and surroundings of this progression. There are so many spaces that have been built up to accommodate this tireless push forward, yet we choose to ignore a good deal of them.

This waste of material and natural space is what has been both scaring me and pulling me in because I want everyone to think about what we’ve been doing and why.

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This seems like an overly negative approach to this subject, but I like to think of it as both questioning and hopeful. I’ve tried to go to places that aren’t totally abandoned or poisoned by industry, instead looking for the everyday unused. I see these regular places without people as more beneficial to the project because they can feel so relatable and familiar but never on par with our expectation or reality.