Studies for Elsewhere (III-IV)

The four prints Fiona Tan created for her first collaboration with BORCH Editions are presented as pairs. Each pair comprises of an image of the sky above Los Angeles coupled with a photogravure of encrypted hand drawn letters.
The prints refer to Tan’s film Elsewhere, in which she captured the skyline of the city of Los Angeles, its skyscrapers fading into the hazy sky. For Tan, the idea of the city – unlike the actual physical space – represents a contemporary utopia, charged with attributions from film and visual culture, yet beautiful only from a distance. The images are accompanied by a mesmerizing voice describing a utopian island, perfect and inaccessible at the same time. In the related photogravure, the voice is replaced by a hand-drawn coded script, developed by Thomas More in his celebrated book Utopia from 1516. In Studies for Elsewhere the pairing of the view of the city and the encrypted quote makes for an intriguing couple.