Calder Muller / Reference Grid

I am a cross-disciplinary artist working with photography, digital imaging, sculpture, and installation to explore the boundaries between material reality and systems of understanding. Rooted in a fascination with cartography and metrology, my work investigates how we apply centralized and abstract systems of measurement across the physical landscape, how we organize knowledge into maps and models, and how these maps and models deviate from reality.

I am interested in photography for its ability to directly represent reality, and for its similarity to my own medium of thought. Photographs are artifacts of the real: reflections of worldly phenomena in a medium of information. As single-perspective recordings of reality, photographs are representative of the ways that we are limited in our ability to interact with and sense our world. A photograph can represent things that are massive or miniscule, unseen or invisible, and difficult to describe or to understand.

For Reference Grid, I made landscape photographs that attempted to exist only as material descriptors. I did this by isolating the landscape from the context of horizon, background, and perspective, leaving only a surface description. I think of these images as maps to the physical surface of places. I am interested in describing the physical reality of material across the landscape, using the camera to momentarily freeze longer cycles of change, metamorphosis, decomposition, and growth.

I am inspired by studies of metrology, epistemology, and scientific methodologies of data collection. I ask questions like: How do we know what we know? Where does the world deviate from our perception of it? Ultimately, my practice aims to destabilize assumptions of clarity, precision, and objectivity through imagery which points to the limits of our ability to measure and understand our world.

Caldermuller@gmail.com

@CalderMuller