Untitled (Metal and Shadow)

Ben Alper Photography | 2014   Taken from the term coined by Catalan architect and historian Ignasi de Sola-Morales, 'terrain vague' sites are those that foreground the process of construction and deconstruction and underscore the ambiguous transition from one state of “being” to another.  As a result, these spaces evoke a strong sense of being in between histories, function and time.  This also activates them to explore a number of seemingly diametric relationships – those between presence and absence, inscription and erasure, preservation and ruination and appearance and disappearance. At its most elemental, this work is an examination of space – both physical and psychic.  Our experience of the world is dictated by a few fundamental and interacting spatial and perceptual operations.  It is through these processes that we arbitrate the physical world we encounter everyday.  The brain filters and reconstructs what we see to make it coherent and orienting.  By destabilizing spatial as