Afterwords: Portals

Dylan Everett
→MFA Photography 2019

Part of my photographic practice consists of collecting, collaging, and re-contextualizing imagery from Google Earth. This allows me to collapse multiple locations and time periods into new abstract forms, upending the notion of rectangular photographs that represent single moments in space and time. I also use these collages to examine the tension between the landscape and the people who populate it.

At the end of last semester, I realized I had hit a wall with this work—I had grown bored of mining Google Earth for "issues" to comment on. During final critique, a classmate commented that he wasn't sure if he was looking "at the end of the old world or the start of a new one" in response to a collage I created about the edge of a nuclear crater. His comment sparked my new series of Portals. These collages explore the abstract notion of a new world—how might we enter it and what might it look like? I have begun crafting new landforms from existing mountains, canyons, and ravines pushed up against island waters, algae blooms, and barren deserts. They read as portals, mirrors, pools, geodes, and lakes. I’m excited by their endless possibilities.

_{Portal #1, 2018, collaged inkjet prints on Tyvek, 16 x 16 in.}

_{Portal #9, 2018, collaged inkjet prints on Tyvek, 35 x 33 in.}

_{Portal #6, 2018, collaged inkjet prints on Tyvek, 20 x 23 in.}