Andrew
Paul
Skoda

"'The strangest part of the dream,' said Pelletier, 'was the water was alive." 

-Roberto Bolaño, 2666

L’appel du Vide (roughly translated into The Call of the Void) is the impulse to leap forward experienced while standing at the edge of a cliff, only to recoil. It is the urge to tug the steering wheel of a vehicle towards the opposing lane of traffic. Most infer that this desire to jump affirms the will to live, as the survival instincts of the brain force the body to reverse from danger. L’appel du Vide is concerned with the evaluation of both learned and inherited instincts, both in observation and practice. Critically mindful of challenging the viewer’s passive looking in the age of rapid digital consumption of images, while acknowledging that internet and smartphone culture has greatly increased general knowledge of communication using purely visual grammar, diction, and prose. The images work to convince the viewer by some subtle argument that true narrative and documentation is impossible, and that photographic images ripped from their respective contexts will never allow a narrative that is not broken and fragmented to exist yet still celebrates the instinctual process of looking and the deceptive nature of re- and de-contextualized images. They assure the viewer that fact, light, observation, and humanity are not committed to an unambiguous coexistence.