Pareidolies

David Hartwell exclusively photographs plants from his garden in Pasadena, California. This self-imposed territory of a quarter of an acre is his frame, his palette. Whereas anthropomorphism is frowned upon by academics as childish behavior, here it is encouraged. To most people, plants are experienced as ubiquitous passive bystanders with a somewhat pleasant disposition. These perceived benign life stories are fertile ground to explore iconic and symbolic modes of cognitive representation. Plants allow the artist to observe an audience ascribe; and project onto; the most fanciful of human traits upon something that has none: pareidolia. While a scientist may strive to limit subjective in(ter)ferences in their research, the artist will always be part of the creative process and the final result. Hartwell peers down at and exposes a plant’s most private parts. He reinterprets its life story for spectators who were never the intended audience of the striptease. It is the artist who magnifies our gaze of those shameless exhibitionists.

Hartwell’s creations are constructions of hundreds of images taken at minute distance intervals resulting in final pieces of incredible resolution along with high quality prints many times larger than their original subjects. The images lie at the confluence of the scientific image, traditional botanical illustration and contemporary representation. His photographs challenge the audience to reevaluate their appreciation about how craft differs from art, if at all. His muses are unmistakably vegetal in origin yet still foreign and perplexing to the uninitiated. He uses technology along with the technical and narrative skills he acquired in the commercial field to blur the lines between the world described by science, the world as it appears to us, and the world as we would like it to be.