Elizabeth Shear

The Shape of Things

The world around you is constructed. When you go to work, lunch, grocery shopping, everything is fabricated. It is the job of a designer to create experiences. When you walk into a grocery store and the first thing you smell is fresh fruit, you can be assured this is not a mistake, rather a team of people somewhere made the discovery that this aroma would titillate you senses therefore making your stomach growl and your role as a buyer more lucrative.

We fall subject to this manipulation daily, many of us unaware it is even happening. When the world is constructed to make you feel a particular way in particular situations how can you rely on your senses to convey a genuine reaction—is such an experience even possible? Through taking an observatory standpoint in these evocative situations my hope is to create a point of realization between the experience of being in this place and the analytical approach one can take when viewing it in a photograph.

Although your emotional reaction to being in or observing these locations is ultimately beyond your control, noticing this reaction and the forces provoking it will change the way you look at your surroundings and potentially the way you exist within them.