Choki Lindberg’s photographs appear at first glance to depict interiors, often in a state of decay, void of human presence. The work is full of detail and fragmented stories. There are traces left behind, and we are invited to investigate and to associate freely. However, once we stop to study the details, an odd dimension surfaces. The proportions appear warped. Textures are exaggerated and there’s a clumsiness to the objects. And slowly the artifice begins to unravel.. What we see, are in fact meticulously crafted small-scale sets. Built by hand, every object is deliberately placed. The lighting carefully constructed. It is a visual deceit, in a language of its own, that questions reality and our notions of permanence.
“I work more like a painter or sculptor than a photographer - the image is constructed rather than capturing something existing, and working on a small scale gives me enormous freedom within very rigid confines. Building the models is full of limitations. Both the limit of the materials and the amount of detail possible, many things have to be altered and omitted, much like how we reconstruct it, each time we access a memory. Im more interested in how that memory felt, than how it “really was” The walls felt cool, or the flowers on the table seemed transparent.. that was what was important.. and so the process becomes a kind of boiling down to the essence of that moment, emotion or scene I’m trying to encompass. It is like a condensed reality, where new questions and meanings might be found.. “