All the images in Sunset in Simulacrum question what photography is today — what it can do, and what it can no longer claim. Every one is built entirely in 3D render engines: no camera, no location, no light. Like a billboard selling the perfect holiday, each is a false world constructed to trick us — a trompe l’oeil of desire, engineered the way advertising engineers spiritual longing into something briefly satisfiable by a purchase.
The series pairs directly against Jarrells Cemetery and the West Virginia mining wallpapers from the same period: the real landscape, exploited to produce the energy and materials the fantasy image is selling. Sunset, kitsch postcard, tourist billboard on one side; strip mine on the other. The same economic cycle produces both — desire and destruction as two faces of the same transaction, staged as light and lit from behind, in the exact plastic register of a hotel-lobby lightbox.
Works
