Christopher Petrich

“Regardless of when they strike, don’t resist them. The daydream-fighting face is even weirder than the yawn-fighting face.” The Science of Daydreams, Colin Nissan, The New Yorker, 2013

Photographs are weird.

They are mutable; they are intransigent. They record, like a footprint, but say no more about the ground of living than the footprint says about the person. A photograph can serve expression but only when the subject is so thoroughly plain that it can tolerate a frosting of irony, like a biscuit.

Photography can serve time, but only when recorded time is distant, otherwise an image is no more easily seen, clearly seen, than your nose below your eyes flattened against the window pane. The photograph resists no push, prod, pinch or poke. It tells your truth or lies to your face. It is false, it is a drug, and it rings true as a daydream.

It came to me one day to dream of different things. I was on Kalaloch Beach in the evening in the dead of winter on the Pacific beach. The air was cold, but there was no wind, and the sun was low in the sky before sunset. The deep golden light played over very smooth stones heaped above the tideline. It stopped us; I could not resist the shot.

It was later that I wished to dissolve the stones in mist. My hand pushed them into a heap of pattern and color from layered parts found in the original clean, bland ordered photograph. It is to drift away from light collected to light imagined.

I conjured this project to rake bits of picture into flattened, regular, exquisite visions of nonsense. By design I tend to center a motif surrounded by complex regular patterns, which is an ancient form, called a “carpet” or “quilt”.

But I come to each piece by instinct, trusting a central notion about a special picture I have taken and with no idea how any single photograph will be transformed, I stir the image and set it to drift about as daydreams.