This work is from an on-going project, coincidence, which joins narrative photographs made in urban environments with landscape images that show little or no evidence of any human activity. Each pair consists of two images that interact to create a linkage of time and space, of artificial and natural, perceived and not perceived, suggesting that whatever circumstances are apparent in the moment are just tiny fragments of an infinite and timeless universe.
These diptychs evolved out of an attempt to resolve the difference in my mind between the two major branches in my work. I felt that I was seeing landscapes and the urban environment from different perspectives and concluded that the way I understand was being fundamentally changed by where I happened to be. Until that point it seemed natural to group these bodies of work separately, but I was troubled by the feeling that there was something missing from both groups. Although they seemed complete logically they fell short of expressing something crucial that I wanted to remember: that it is important to keep in mind that what is happening in our consciousness is mostly illusionary. I don’t know if they succeed in doing that, but they do create some interesting tensions and interactions that speak to the fascinatingly paradoxical nature of photography.
What is important to me is the way that the images interact to undermine each other’s context. You could say that the “content” of each pair is the invisible line where they meet.
— David Evans, Mission, British Columbia, Canada