Jon Scott Anderson combines a painter's sensibility with a filmmaker's structure to create his recent series of large scaled photographs. These scroll sized narrative landscapes are composed of varying focal lengths combined seamlessly to re-set the experience of a place. The eye is set on a journey across a space that moves from the close-up to the distant in the breath of its width.
Anderson's degrees, a B.F.A. in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and a M.F.A. in filmmaking from Syracuse University, inform these images which represent a symbiotic merging of his concerns with the narratives of space and place and its transformative effects.
Artist's statement:
The Chinese ideogram for landscape is mountains/water. My photographic re-settings are a kind of mountains and water painting that is aligned with the Buddhist and Taoist sense that nature is imbued with the sacred.
It is not a nature represented by idealized images but one where from its dynamic forces of actualization and transformation an image is configured. They are about how we experience a place - where the near and far and the empty and full become a part of the same narrative space. Chinese aesthetics speak of these polarities as essential to a vision of the world.
The manipulation of the image elements echo how the Japanese scroll garden is structured within a limited frame, where rocks and plantings are set as if seemingly found in nature. However the placement of their components are aligned with aesthetic principles of forces long studied and documented to experientially convey deep connections to nature.
In acknowledging, studying and implementing this long aesthetic heritage this series attempts to contribute to our own culture's sense of space and place on which to build a political and spiritual connection.
