Blair Bodden

January 17 - March 31, 2023

Laura Blair Bodden (b. 1982, Pleasanton, TX USA) is a contemporary artist who works primarily in photography. Her work investigates liminal space, the idea of an in-between space and a space of transition. This is done by inventing a setting for liminal space to exist within by creating shadows from constructed landscapes to capture them within the camera.  Process is an intricate and detailed part of her practice, building and constructing the subject matter for her photographs. With her work, Bodden thinks in narratives and speaks with imagery that is both beautiful and awkward in the same moment. She creates images that speak to time and space, using imagery that plays on the border where imagination meets the real.

• PRESS RELEASE

Artist Statement

There are moments where our visual perception is tested, creating a moment where the invisible become visible to the naked eye. The landscape has an innate quality to conjure this type of moment during twilight that allows its changing light and emerging shadows to transform into a plane for liminal space to become visible. Liminal space is described as an in-between space, a space of transition, and a space of waiting or anticipation.

The landscape is a place that naturally changes with just a slight shift in light to dark; this is when its shadows begin to transform into a distortion of the familiar and become a place of transition, as if to allow a door to be opened to somewhere else, leaving its inhabitants waiting at its threshold.

Capturing the shadows of constructed landscapes creates the imagery for Thresholds. Using the natural landscape as inspiration to construct artificial landscapes into hand-built sets using found and hand-made objects, each set is then lit creating a new landscape of shadows. These shadow landscapes are then photographed and edited digitally to create panoramic images. The projection aspect in this work is a still image that has been altered and animated to represent a specific time of day that allows for liminal space to be seen.

The imagery for Thresholds is accomplished through the explorations of the space, time, and shadow landscapes along with one’s perceptions and surroundings that invent these images and experiences that are rooted within the enigmatic and the estranged. It is through these findings that this work and concept is transformed first from the mind into a set and then into the camera to finally exist as an image that embraces the nature of the shadow landscapes as a liminal space.