American designer and architect Eric Randall Morris gives us a closer look at his stark and whimsical architectural edits, where (sub)urban surroundings merge with daydream and nightmare.
As if floating in hyperspace, designer Eric Randall Morris crafts imagery that represents an “architecture of the unconscious” where buildings defy logic with color and paradox. His ongoing study, “An American Hyperreality” transforms and mutates architectures within scaleless monochromatic fields, setting the stage for the mind and hand to play. These distortions represent a intentional irreverence for the original photographs, and celebrate their dissolution of reality with pastel skies, sharp geometries, and embedded idiosyncrasies.
What began as a photo study of the houses and neighborhoods that constructed his daily commutes, shifted into a serial exploration of the oddities, peculiarities, and perversions of American vernacular architecture. Beginning as an effort of pure documentation, these edits started to transform into more uncanny and unfamiliar representations of what he was photographing.
“As the the work developed, priorities shifted, and I realized the story I was telling was not about my surroundings or the streets I walked, but it became an exercise in visual storytelling; translating daydreams into the various architectures I was photographing.” - Morris on the project’s transformed narrative.
The post-production process became my storytelling device; this granted the ability to quickly translate thoughts and stretch truths in unpronounced ways. Architecture itself relies on inherent deceit, and these images operate within that zone of fact and fiction, mixing the (sub)urban sceneries with part wonderland / part nightmare - the pursuit of a hyperreality.