Sublime Forms

Some time ago, I encountered a consumer product packaged in an expertly crafted die-cut box. Unfolding the unique construction revealed a photograph—a sublime wilderness scene. This leveraging of form and imagery to evoke consumer desire sparked a conceptual inquiry into how notions of wilderness operate within commercial contexts to construct meaning and facilitate aura.

Created with industrial production methods and site-specific photography, Sublime Forms (working title) emulates how commercial encasements function as loci of desire and implied value—at once physical form and ideological structure. It draws from the ways that photographs of the sublime are deployed in commercial contexts to prompt feelings of transcendence while encouraging passive spectatorship over embodied engagement. By contextualizing sublime imagery within analogous semiotic forms, the project aims to highlight these manipulative foundations while operating on the viewer with a similar sense of sinister aura.

Each work maintains a dual identity as sculptural object and vessel for an absent product. The container forms are thus void spaces with the landscapes serving as proxies for the objects they ostensibly represent. In this way, the works exist simultaneously as art object and non-object, presence and absence. By inverting the consumer hierarchy—where packaging is secondary to the product it holds—these forms make the absence itself an active force, helping to emphasize packaging as sites of emotional conditioning and ecological distancing.