UNM senior Michael Borowski says he knows what solitude is like.
He vividly remembers those adolescent feelings of alienation and isolation that most people would like to forget. This memory affected him, and as a result he has consciously devoted his work as an artist to this experience.
Borowski's senior thesis, "Solitude is not a Measured Space," uses photography to express seclusion. Friday night in the John Sommers Gallery on campus, Borowski said he hopes to transport his audience back into this familiar and emotionally sore place.
"I try to create spaces about choosing to be alone - a turning inward from an outside chaos," Borowski said.
Borowski's large prints are truly the definition of ordinary beauty. In a normal situation, the image of an empty high school sports field - empty running tracks and empty tennis courts - is far from what people define as beautiful.
But these areas are displayed in very large, photo-print format, mounted on board and then laminated for a shine, giving the work a painting-like quality. In this way, the banality of everyday spaces is transformed into something extraordinary.
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"My interest in photographing space began as a way to record my experience of the ordinary," Borowski wrote in his BFA honors thesis. "I wanted to make photographs that were more than just topography, however. I wanted my work to be evocative, if not beautiful."
Borowski shot the images with a camera that produces 4 inch by 5 inch negatives and then printed the images in a process called lightjet printing. In this digital process, a printer exposes the photographic paper using lasers and the results are hard to believe. The grass in the photos is so detailed it practically begs the viewer to run through the photo barefoot.
To add to the experience, the photos were shot with a wide-angle lens at a vantage point that makes the viewer feel like they are looking down into the images.ˇˇ
"The size of the photographs allows them to fill the viewer's field of vision, pulling the viewer into the space," he said. "At the same time, they are repelled by the lack of a subject."
But strangely enough, it isn't a good enough repellant and viewers feel compelled to get repelled again and again as they circle the gallery. Though "Solitude is not a Measured Space" deals with issues of seclusion in adolescence, the theme is universal and strangely comforting.
The photos evoke an awkward pain, but because they evoke it so well, the work is astonishing. Borowski has taken average subjects people see every day and feel nothing for, and turned them into art that pulls an internal response from the viewer.
Borowski is graduating in December and plans to take a break before graduate school.
He sees "Solitude is not a Measured Space" as closure, his goodbye.
"I want to see what happens to my work when I'm not in school," he said.
