The artist duo Anderson & Low are renowned for blending fact and fiction into seamless, realistic photographs, using a wide variety of historic and contemporary photographic processes. Their latest series, Voyages, takes as its starting point ship models owned by the Science Museum in London, but the pictures transform these humble objects into evocative and grandly ambitious images.
Struck by the dreamlike quality of the model vessels as they appeared in storage, the artists photographed them through the translucent plastic covering them. The resulting pictures present the historic boats and ships as soft vignettes, their details cloaked in a misty haze that suggests the thrill and anticipation of embarking on a new adventure. At the same time, the antique vintage of the models conjures legends of ancient mariners and chronicles from the Age of Exploration.
The exhibition also includes the artists’ selections from the Eastman Museum collection that resonate with their work, as well as excerpts from the artists’ previous bodies of work and new photographs made in response to their explorations of the museum’s collection. The common theme binding all the photographs on display is that, in the artists’ words, “Making true voyages of discovery does not mean seeking new landscapes, but using one’s own imagination to view the world through new eyes.”