A collection of familiar objects transformed by isolation, where buildings, machines, boats, and artifacts become monuments to history, memory, labor, and imagination.
Artist Statement
Pinnacle II grew from a simple idea: remove an object from the world in which I found it and give it a world of its own.
The photographs begin with things I have encountered and photographed—buildings, machines, boats, sculpture, agricultural equipment, maritime artifacts and remnants of Long Island history. I isolate them from their original surroundings and place them on an open, nearly endless plain beneath a gray sky.
Without the visual noise of their original environments, familiar objects begin to change. A rusted machine can become sculpture. A lighthouse can become a monument. A forgotten truck can become a portrait.
The plain is intentionally spare. It has no particular address and no particular moment in time. Objects that could never have occupied the same landscape are allowed to exist together. Scale shifts. History overlaps.
Some images remain quiet and documentary in spirit; others move toward humor, memory, mystery and the surreal.
Despite their differences, these subjects have something in common. They are things that caught my attention and made me stop. Many bear evidence of use, weather, labor and age. Others survive because someone thought they were worth preserving. By separating them from their surroundings, I am asking the viewer to look at them again—not simply for what they were made to do, but for what they have become.
Pinnacle II is ultimately about seeing. It is a collection of objects and places removed from ordinary context and brought together in one imagined landscape—a place where history, memory and invention can occupy the same ground.
— Michael Domino
Port Jefferson, New York
