Sublime Forms emulates how commercial encasements function as loci of desire and implied value—at once physical form and ideological structure. Created with industrial production methods and site-specific photography, the works take the form of sculptural objects resembling commercial packaging. Images of sublime wilderness landscapes are folded into these structures, drawing on the ways that photographs of the sublime are deployed in commercial contexts to prompt feelings of transcendence while encouraging passive spectatorship over embodied engagement. By contextualizing sublime imagery within analogous semiotic forms, the project is a meditation on the manipulative nature of these objects.
Each work maintains a dual identity as sculptural object and vessel for an absent object. The container forms are thus void spaces, with the landscapes serving as proxies for the objects they ostensibly represent. In this way, absence becomes an active force. The works exist simultaneously as object and non-object, presence and absence. By inverting the usual hierarchy between product and packaging, the container becomes legible as a site of emotional conditioning and ecological distancing.
