I’m perpetually intrigued by photography projects that use perspective composites and collages to reinterpret the city — examples we’ve previously seen in the form of “urban hackscapes,” “photographic time machines” and Abigail Reynolds’ The Universal Now. So I love artist David Semeniuk‘s Landscape Permutations project — an ongoing exploration of “how spaces and places are experienced, remembered, and represented.” Semeniuk uses images of his hometown, Red Deer, Alberta, and recombines them to imagine a different hypothetical reality of spatial layouts.

In each work of this series, I have brought together separate components of two images, each with a unique interpretant, and forced them to share a single, new meaning. Despite an apparent loss of information within the larger frame of each work, the resulting composite image contains novel, endemic meaning which transcends either image used in its creation.” ~ David Semeniuk

What makes Semeniuk particularly fantastic — at least for me, as an avid proponent of cross-disciplinary curiosity — is that he describes himself as a “formally trained scientist, and an autodidactic artist”: His academic training is in marine biogeochemistry, and he considers his photographic experiments and artistic expression of his scientific exploration.

I am also very much interested in the representational capacity of photographs, and am motivated by questions such as: in what ways is a photograph a transparent view of the world (i.e. akin to looking through a pair of binoculars)? In what ways and to what degree does a photograph truthfully depict reality, and how is this influenced by the naturalistic qualities of photography? Despite the causal origin of a photograph, can a photograph become a more truthful depiction of a particular place?” ~ David Semeniuk

Full of simple poeticism,Landscape Permutations feels like a gentle reminder that our experience of the world is a highly subjective function of our memory, our imagination and our sense of presence. Cue in BBC’s What Is Reality?.