Artist Statement

For five months, I photographed what I encountered and what stayed with me: boats, barns, machines, animals, abandoned structures, maritime artifacts, roadside remnants and objects whose original purposes were beginning to disappear.

Each work begins with one of my own photographs. I remove the surroundings that once defined the subject and reconstruct the image within a spare landscape of dry grass and gray sky. Roads disappear. Water disappears.

Crowds, buildings and distractions fall away. What remains is the subject and the space around it.

At first, these photographs developed as separate bodies of work. There were boats and anchors, barns and working machines, rusted vehicles, maritime history, architecture and sculpture. But as the work continued, the boundaries between those collections began to disappear.

A gas pump could stand beside a whale. A mermaid could signal toward a distant fishing boat. A mechanical horse could inhabit the same landscape as an abandoned radar station. A shark could fall nose-first into the earth. Three empty chairs could carry as much presence as a monumental machine.

Eventually, I stopped seeing the landscape as a background.

It had become a place.

Within that place, scale becomes uncertain and function begins to disappear. Familiar objects become monuments. Machines begin to resemble people. Boats exist without water. Things built for movement become permanently still. Objects separated by decades, geography and purpose somehow seem to recognize one another.

Some of these subjects carry real histories—the working waterfront, Long Island agriculture, Montauk, Camp Hero, the railroad, abandoned industry. Others move toward the impossible. I am interested in the point where those two worlds meet: where something documented can become something imagined without completely surrendering what it once was.

THE PINNACLE brings these explorations together for the first time.

The photographs are not intended to recreate the places where these subjects were found. They are portraits of what remains after those places have been taken away—of work, memory, usefulness, obsolescence, humor, survival and time.

Everything has been removed except what I wanted you to see.

And everything has arrived on the same plain.

— Michael Domino
Port Jefferson, New York