TITLE: CORNERED

“The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions, however unconscious of this they may be.”
- Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929

CORNERED is a series of large format photographic images that calls our attention to the corners of enclosures we routinely inhabit, yet often never truly see. Irving fixes her large format camera on nondescript interiors, transforming them into studies on the architecture—spatial and psychological—of confinement, straddling the boundary of absurdist and unsettling. Both banal and bizarre, the Kafkaesque quirks and the illusionistic geometry of these locations draw the eye deep into the picture, only to be thwarted in its progress through the space. These images are maps of both geometric and conceptual possibilities, reminding us that seeing is an unstable process, as dependent on the brain as on the eye.

AUTHOR: Austin Irving (United States)

Born and raised in New York City, Austin Irving is a visual artist who works with large format analog photography. Irving with a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s TISCH School Of The Arts in 2006. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Hong Kong, India, Germany, France, and across The United States. In 2020, her projects SHOW CAVES and NOT AN EXIT won first place at The Budapest International Foto Awards in the Science and Architecture categories. In 2019, her projects NOT AN EXIT and PLANTS IN EXILE were both awarded the gold prize at The PX3 Prix De La Photographie in the Fine Art/Architecture and Nature/Trees categories. She was an Artist-In-Residence at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India in 2017 and aboard The S.S. Vallejo at The Varda Artist Residency in Sausalito, CA in 2019. Her images have been featured in The LA Times, Wired, Slate, Architectural Digest, LA Weekly, PDN, Art Ltd., Artillery, TimeOut NY, The International Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, Frontrunner, Artsy, Voyage LA, Yatzer, and Artweek LA.

Irving cites Thomas Demand, Bernd & Hilla Becher, MC Escher, Rene Magritte, Lynne Cohen, and James Turrell as artists whose work have impacted her practice.

Irving currently lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Wilding Cran Gallery.