Platz # 1

In his photographic process, Monteith begins by layering one hundred identical photographs together, one hundred sequential moments photographed over a particular time span, each layer reduced in opacity to virtual invisibility. In building these composites, a single image emerges, while a surplus of data composed of the sum of its layers is digitally stored within each file. Monteith considers these composite photographs as documents in a process of becoming, rather than as image-objects whose meaning is fixed by their content. His digitalized layering process renders each "original" photograph, each layer, auratic. When compressed, these large digital filesshed information. This act of discard, which parallels everyday forgetting, is consciously and subconsciously carried out by each of us. "Remembering," as stated by Freud, "is an act that always belongs in the present, and is always accompanied by an act of forgetting, and forgetting is a form of hiding memory." What we remember or forget about a place, a relationship, or an event is dependent upon the conditions of our socialization, our biology, our education, our politics, and our nature. Personal memories structure our reality, and individual and collective narratives structure the personal, political, local, national, and global.

Corresponding to the interiors represented in his photographs, Monteith created responsive drawings, reductive expressions of his spatial subjectivity added as a final layer to the image document. Introduced within the photographic picture plane, these drawings construct an experience that embodies a way of looking simultaneously at two different kinds of visual and intellectual organization. On the surface of the photograph, a condition of exchange is created that actively flips between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. As the eye moves over the surface of each photograph, certain geographies repel while others draw one's view in and around.

These represented spaces, despite their emptiness, are lived spaces, sites of spatial and social narratives. Frequented by stories that took place over the course of time, they bear traces of the past and are travelled through, not only physically and subjectivity, but imaginatively.