Patrick Bock was born in Atlanta, USA in 1976.  After earning a degree in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, he worked as a cartographer before moving to Corsica to devote himself to photography.  He lives in Paris and Corsica.

Artist Statement:
The central preoccupations of my work are an exploration through photography and video of the representation of space and time and an investigation of the border areas separating photography, video, and painting.
My work is informed by two majors currents of art from which I have appropriated a pictoral vocabulary: the Chinese landscape painting tradition and the Color Field movement.  These seemingly different genres, with the former taking as subject the natural world with the latter renouncing any direct references to nature, share both a stated spiritual imperative and the intention of the artist to create a self-contained universe into which the viewer is drawn.  To that end the artists call on rigorous dynamic composition to imbue their still images with a sense of rhythm and movement.
In my ongoing series of seascapes, the elements of composition are the horizon line dividing the two planes of sea and sky, and the colors reflected from the water, clouds, and air.  The reaction to the ‘real’ scene is always the same:  How can this grand expanse of space and color ­– and its meditative ebb and flow – be communicated in a photograph?  At certain times the horizon line – so frequently evocative of the infinite in literature and painting – is clearly defined, with all the sharp detail afforded by large-format photography.  At other times the division between sea and sky is blurred beyond distinction, and the subject matter itself verges on the unrecognizable. 

The choice of photography as medium provides a distance to more freely explore these painting vocabularies.  However, the transposition of these vocabularies from one medium to another has required the development of certain photographic techniques.  Whereas a painter relies upon his dexterity and imagination, a photographer performs a comparatively simple and restrictive act of capturing light on a sheet of film.  The conditions of capture remain subjective, however, as decisions are made concerning both the lens and the film. For the latter choices concern type and exposure time (both relative to the subject movement and to the film, as in over- or under-exposure).  For the lens, there are questions of optical quality, from near-perfection to blurred focus to camera obscura techniques and of depth of field.  I make use of these choices to perform an act that feels almost like painting with light upon the film surface.  The desired conjoinment of photography and painting is furthur underlined by the choice of pigment inkjet prints on fine art paper avoiding the plastic feel of a traditional photograph.

This conjoinment raises questions about the natures of photography and painting.  Preeminent among them is the question concerning our trust in the ‘realness’ of a photograph versus the ‘artificiality’ of a painting.  Our visual perception depends on the light reflected from objects and how the mechanics of our eyes communicate that light to the brain.  The lens and film process the same information differently.  We trust as ‘real’ those photographs that most resemble the way that we see: shutter speeds between 1/25 and 1/125 of a second and film and exposure that reproduce familiar light and color.  But are other photographs any more or less real?

Recent video seascapes employ the same technique and vocabulary to create large, floating images that function as ‘moving monochromes.’ The meditative effect is similar to that of the photographs, but unique in that it imposes a rhythm of its own.

Other recent video work more directly approaches the tradition of East Asian landscape painting.  Borne by a trip to the outer islands of Korea’s Yellow Sea, the work is an attempt to reconcile the seemingly antithetical. How can one approach centuries-old ink and brush painting with a contemporary video camera?  And morever, how to react to the modern reality of a landscape and land that one has only experienced through media, and experienced most fully through that very centuries-old tradition?