“Imagined Landscapes” are Patty Maher’s most recent photography series of surreal photography. The landscapes are indeed imagined – each of them is artificially constructed to create the vision to a new reality.
Maher, the Ontario-based artist, says she draws her artistic inspiration from exploring the feminine in contexts of natural and urban settings. She also describes this series as “self-portraits.” Although the faces of the subjects are hidden, their postures, gestures, and body alignments, as well as the surrounding colors and shapes, are enough to paint the story of the characters’ inner worlds.
This series features constructed surreal landscapes which call the audience to dwell on the photo’s meaning and fashion their own story based on what they see. The characters in her photographs are, in a sense, one with the landscape – the world surrounding them seems to be an extension of the world within. Imagine that each time you are sad, it begins to rain. Or each time you are melancholic, it’s sunset. This photo series gives that impression – that the way we feel on the inside and the way we view the world, are in fact – one.
