With garlands, I push how different light sources (scanner = artificial | outside = natural light) intermingle and generate depth. Everything in the photograph is done “in camera” - no digital trickery after the fact. Thus, the idea of “still life” becomes less about dead nature (nature morte) and more about active and improvisational “drawing”. The natural world is alive and ever-evolving.

The install will be on a wall that is 12’h x 25’w, incorporating the 12’h x 25”w edge. There will be specially fabricated self-adhesive wall vinyl from the garland series, in addition to a detail from the garlands on the edge.

“In Colby Caldwell’s garlands photographs, technology yields to nature. Based in Asheville, North Carolina, Caldwell draws inspiration from the Blue Ridge Mountains, using a flatbed scanner instead of a traditional camera. Roaming the outdoors, he scans various plants and natural oddities that catch his eye. Removed from its controlled environment, the scanning process becomes unwieldy and produces images with imperfections—what Caldwell calls “digital glitches”—adding texture to the final work. These glitches reinforce the complex relationship between the artificial and the organic.

Embedded within Caldwell’s enlarged image here is a poem by Bernard Welt, a long-time collaborator. The poem's staccato phrasing echoes the visual glitches in the image, furthering Caldwell’s implicit reminder that, even as technology consumes us, nature persists.” –from the wall label by NCMA curator Jared Ledesma

This work happens on the forest floor with a flatbed scanner as my makeshift camera. I’ve used the scanner-as-camera in my studio in the past. It occurred to me that I could take it out to the woods for new reconnaissance. For new inquiries. I think of it like collecting field recordings — allowing, listening, seeing.