Carey Shaw

PROJECT STATEMENT

“Over the last few years, I have noticed a change in the way I think and feel about photographing people and stories. I’ve been giving more consideration to how a viewer judges a photograph, and how the subject reacts to this and their notions of self. In reaction to this, I began experimenting with various ways to create portraits and stories. Considering different approaches I can use to “protect” those I am portraying by working to create a barrier between the viewer and my subject. Working with these ideas, and scale, I began constructing dioramas. Uncanny Valley became a series of elaborate stories and memories constructed photographically using built scale model dioramas, photography and superimposed portraits.

Uncanny Valley includes 1/160 scale paper dioramas, including a woman in a dark trailer park, a violinist in a city apartment, and a woman waiting in a roadside ice cream shop. For the Cannibal Lot iteration of the series, I used the history of a decaying house to recreate and re-imagine three rooms, throughout three decades of history. The rooms were brought back to life by creating 1/12 scale replicate dioramas and experimented with AI to create imagined inhabitants. The dioramas were photographed as created, and also documented inside its original room. An elaborate process of documentation.

With the dioramas and imagined stories, I am creating a world that I can place a subject within and because it isn’t real, they are “safe” from the viewer. Often their scale being so small that they weren’t even noticed. Small stories and tall tales. Or reimagining a time and place, in a scale and technique that elicits wonder and unease, inviting the viewer to slow down and look more closely.” – Carey Shaw