TC00565718

There is not simply one American landscape but a multitude of American landscapes - another for each attempt to record it. The variations in accessing this scenery are as infinite as the number of people trying to capture it. How we approach an image is precise only to that moment.

Colin Snapp allows us to understand that a new reality of that landscape is created each time it is approached. Any of these reproductions are just as real as the next and the actual landscape is no more truthful than the reproduction. In this line of thought simultaneous existences are possible and mediating our perception is in no way a deception of reality.

Concerned with tourism and the way we record our time in nature, Snapp builds a complex layering of mediated experiences in American National Parks. Snapp's series of ongoing photographs titled TC Studies crystallise the ephemeral moment, employing a date stamp to the side of the image reinforces this singular and fleeting moment passed. These depictions of wild flora are in fact several times removed as the photograph is translated through video then re-photographed once more. The final c-print reveals an intriguing sculpturality as we see at a monumental scale the intricacies of the glass lattice of a video camera's flip out screen, each prism holding an effigy of nature.

The original source is now far removed from the resulting simulacra, bringing into question its validity and proximity to reality. Acknowledging that most of our experiences today come from screen-based reproductions, Snapp's exhibition TC00565718 measures distance in relation to truth and time. When Baudrillard reconsiders Ecclesiastes he states "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none" reinforcing this by adding "The simulacrum is true".

Snapp's TC Studies construct an understanding of shared existence. We become aware of multiple entry and exit points to the same subject through his use of time, scale and mediation in his photomedia works. Each level of mediation does not lead to a distance from the truth but only to reinforce the multiple representations of truth.

- Joseph Allen Shea, 2018