Nick Simko

I once moved from urban Albuquerque to rural western Kansas for a university teaching position. To pass the time I went on regular walks around my neighborhood. During these treks I encountered three subjects that caught my eye: a fortress-like church, a flag on a flag pole, and a mural on a bridge of a rainbow ending in the sea. Over several years I photographed them all hundreds of times throughout the seasons and at different hours of the day.

Fascinated by the cyclical changes in the weather, the sky, and the light, I assembled each subject into typologies to reflect such dynamic variation. As the images were shot handheld on an iPhone, making each composition slightly different, I was additionally curious to see how 100 compositions of the same subject might look when layered on top of one another. One formally organizes space and time while the other collapses both. I was interested in embracing concrete and the poetic in this project because both attest to how our mind can create contrasting views of a place and our multifaceted relationship to it.