Not an Exit
2021
“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
In this series of dead end doors and hallways, NOT AN EXIT explores the theme of control vis-a-vis its effects on the human. 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. Presented as close-to-life-size Type-C prints, the scale and repetitive compositional elements of these images evoke a methodology of clinical examination and categorization of the liminal spaces we routinely pass through and yet often never truly see. Irving’s years-long project focuses on these spaces of enclosure and suggests an obsessive impetus that speaks to the ways that the pathology of obsession, control’s inseparable Siamese twin, affects our body and psyche. We are going somewhere and yet — there seems to be no way out.
Born and raised in New York City, Austin Irving is a visual artist who works with large format analog photography. Irving graduated cum laude 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.
