Union Territory is series of photographs that act as a record of the growth and death of plants over a period of about 7 studio-bound months. This symbolic garden was seeded in the gaps between collaged and cut-out imagery that brought together images of two politically charged historical buildings: Le Corbusier’s Assembly Building in Chandigarh, India, and The Royal Pavilion, in Brighton, England. They are two unique structures that have virtually no design features that signal where they might be located – they are at once icons of their location, but architecturally alien to them.

Le Corbusier’s concrete Assembly Building is a key component of the design for the new city of Chandigarh that celebrated the end of British colonialism in India and the future freedom and development of the country. In contrast, the Pavilion was created for The Prince Regent (later King George IV) as a seaside retreat to help cure his gout and essentially as a luxurious palace for entertaining guests and female companions. It borrows heavily from the architect’s (John Nash) perception of Indian design, though inside it is far more Chinese.  Both places represent an abstract idea of architecture that bears little thought to its surroundings, and so the Union Territory images isolate them in a new landscape and create a site to observe nature activating, unifying, then dividing and dying amongst these artistic and political artefacts of history.

> Click here for text written by Patrick Amsellem

These photographs address the conflicting relationships between architecture, sport, religion, class and entertainment that have made these structures so historically significant. The first series focused on English football stadia by visually removing them from their actual location and placing them within more unusual environments. The Church of England is an image of Old Trafford (home to Manchester United), placed in the partially blurred town of Canterbury. Here a stadium which is sometimes referred to as ‘The Church of England’ is placed along side (and obscuring) Canterbury Cathedral – home of the Anglican Church. The image represents the great historical disparities that exist in England in terms of the significance of the country’s cities in relation to faith, community and scale.

The most recent series of photographs represent a more international perspective. The idea of the stadium (in this case Baseball) as a fortress or palace refers to the role of ‘the team’ to their fans, but also considers the iconographic and historical status of the buildings themselves. Here all the locations and stadiums are essentially American, but the castles are from Europe. The implication is that these stadia are often the iconic structures of the U.S. urban landscape in a way that older structures (like castles) are in other parts of the world. Though they form a significant part of the identity, culture and employment of the community, the architecture and franchise is often surprisingly disposable.

This series of images is designed to physically exist only as postcards, as souvenirs of the cities, their cathedral and football (soccer) team. Each cathedral shares its name with its local football club, and its architecture has been re-emphasized and isolated with the use of the local club (or clubs’) colors. The idea is to compare the societal place of the church with the impact of football clubs over the last 100 years or so. The obvious connection is the idea of sport as religion, but these images also conflate the idea of what the iconic structure of a city now is, and how money and class play into that local society.

It is interesting that the cathedrals do not always match the stature of their club, so a masterpiece of Norman or Gothic architecture may take on the symbolic colors of a club that struggles to maintain league status. However, the vibrant coloring of the structures serve as a reminder that some of these great buildings were not always so grey, but were also adorned by colorfully painted statues and ornamentation. These postcards will therefore act a souvenir of a place both past and present, and symbolize its evolving cultural significance; something that a tourist postcard rarely does.

The Specular Edifice photographs have evolved from an earlier series of images based on Jeremy Bentham’s penal concept of the Panopticon. The Specular Edifices are constructed with images inserted on the ‘floors’ of the building structures, and mirrored Mylar on the ‘ceilings’. They operate like a periscope where an object may be viewed when it is not in a direct line of sight, except that the still image gives the illusion that the viewer is seeing through, up and beyond a building.

Framed by darkness these structures reveal a collection of distorted images, such as books apparently falling or flying through the air. Here the architecture literally acts as a container for items of written thought, where the books are symbols of fleeting moments of understanding and influence. The way that the shape of this edifice is seen is dependant on these interior images set against the sky, suggesting that like the human brain we project our own image as much through our knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs as through our exterior.

Specular Edifice IV takes on a more tectonic abstract form, where the photographs reflected within the structure both define the architecture as well as confound it. These images of houses, flats, water towers, churches, factories, and furniture are all caught in various states of flight or free-fall. These architectural objects represent moments of apparent permanence that we experience every day. Yet in today’s environment, architecture has become increasingly visual. Craft, presence, and detail have receded, whilst image, juxtaposition, surface and impression have taken over. These photographs are representative of this change: the dominance of visual appearance over actuality.