Andrew Turner

Dream Weaver

*FINALIST*

I’m a digital artist from Columbus, Georgia, journeying through rural Georgia farmland, down the forgotten Coast of northwestern Florida and across Bayou Country of southern Louisiana photographing landscapes and architecture that serve as ghostly reminders to stained abrasions of our past. I use the landscape as a metaphor for loss, memory, and trauma to the human body. At the age of thirteen I was diagnosed with sarcoma, a bone and tissue cancer, which shaped the lens in which I view and experience the world. During the creation of this series of images my father also was diagnosed with cancer. Having lived the experience before, I was terrified of what awaited my father and family. The impact of the disease stretches beyond the diagnosis or treatment—it is something that will always be there within the scars of mine and my father’s skin. The work I create is a reflection of this idea. I use isolated and abandoned landscapes alongside decaying or wounded architecture as portraits to display the emotional and physical impact cancer can take on the mind and body. I treat these images with rich color in order to elevate the world in which they reside. I print at a large scale, the largest being 40”x60,” to allow the detail and subtleness of mark making in the image to come forth.

This image was taken in Dulac, Louisiana, a community located down the southern tip of Louisiana’s bayous. A landscape of houses on stilts, most with damage from past storms and thick bayous that connect to the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of shrimpers row in Dulac lays a grounded boat riddled with the damage of countless storms now laid to rest on a hostile forsaken landscape. The boat, still upright, exists as a ghost or memory of its past responsibility, however content in its new inevitably. The boat is memorialized by a shower of golden light that slips into the horizon behind.