Page 7 - 원정상 개인전 2025. 12. 3 – 12. 10 KT&G상상마당 춘천갤러리

The photographs capture stone landscapes across Gangwon Province—Chuncheon, Goseong, Taebaek, and others.
Balanced cairns, rocks displaced and held by a frayed rope, exposed strata, fissured surfaces, stones shaped by waves
and sand—each reveals a distinct material story of origin and endurance. The artist also documents cut slopes and
exposed concrete debris shaped by development, retrieving layers of memory overlooked in everyday life. Formed over
aeons yet continually re-emerging even within modern ruins, stone becomes a living archive in which past endings and
future beginnings are tightly interwoven.

The camera listens to the quiet time resting on stone’s surface. In large-scale prints, cracks, particles, and contours move
beyond representation, evoking pressure, endurance, and the breathing of geological layers. Photography becomes
a language through which the silence of stone is rendered perceptible, allowing viewers to encounter their own
temporal sense alongside stone’s deep-time materiality.

Roland Barthes’ notion that photography is toujours ça a été—“it has been”—intensifies the meaning of this work.
Photography folds past existence into the present, superimposing incompatible temporal layers. In Strata of Memory,
the cosmic and geological time within stone, memories of destruction and creation, and the viewer’s present coexist
and reflect one another. Photography mediates this encounter, transforming natural temporality into a sensory
experience.

Ultimately, Strata of Memory brings to the surface the time embedded within stone. In these works, past and present,
nature and humanity, endurance and finitude converge within the photograph, forming a distinct aesthetics of time.
Before stone, viewers sense both the vastness of geological history and the finitude of their own. In this recognition,
stone becomes a mirror. To face the strata of memory is to look into the time of stone—and to understand that across
the depths of hundreds of millions of years, we too have indeed “been here.”

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