Sydney’s accidental sculptures
Leonardo Flores Pares
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Sydney’s accidental sculptures
When I arrived in Sydney, NSW, in 2015, I had no expectations for what the city could bring to my art. While my practice took me on an exploration throughout the big city, being in a new, different place, I was unsure whether the direction of my work had to change or could simply be expressed in a new context.
To explain where my current work was, I have to go back to 2013 to a quiet beach town in my home country, Mexico. Here, I encountered a series of what, to my artistic eye, looked like sculptures or installations on the beach. These objects appeared like a series of interventions in the landscape. Structures such as beach chairs and umbrellas were grouped together and left deserted, abandoned by their owners until they could once again serve a purpose in the high season. I proceeded to take my camera and document what I found.
So, two years later, upon my arrival in Sydney, my eyes where already fixated on this same concept of spotting incidental sculptures on the land. I began documenting random finds I came across around Australia’s most populous city and the interventions they produce on the landscape, as well as the city itself and how everybody interacts with and lives in it. These finds included out-of-place items left on the streets by people, such as supermarket trolleys, old mattresses dotted around the suburbs, roadkill, covered and forgotten or unused boats and structures, old furniture and various items left on footpaths by homeowners waiting for a council pick-up or for neighbours to take the items and give use to the old.
This has been my experience of Sydney and I see my artistic practice as one that’s parallel to the human experience, where there’s a very thin line that divides art and life. I use photography as a tool for visual storytelling and a vehicle that raises questions, such as what is a sculpture? When does an object become a sculpture? What happens to all these items? And how do these accidental sculptures reflect contemporary life in NSW?
I see my artistic practice as one that intersects different disciplines, blurring the lines between sculpture and photography. Each accidental sculpture I document in the landscape has been left unused and forgotten, the stories of its past left blank for the viewer to wonder and draw from their own experience in life.
This series is a portrait of a city, a mirror of society and, although my aim is not to tell the viewer what they should see or think, I hope that through my photography, the viewer asks these same questions and views the world with a little more curiosity.
Leonardo Flores Pares Born in Tehuacan, a small town in Mexico, Leonardo Flores Pares packed up his things (namely his photography gear) and moved to Sydney, Australia, in 2015. He is a visual artist whose main medium is photography and he obtained his degree in visual arts in 2012. Since then, he has completed several workshops and diplomas in photography, contemporary art and performance art. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Mexico, Spain, the USA and Australia. It explores the limits of photography and how it intersects with other disciplines. Leonardo is interested in transforming common objects and everyday situations to give new meaning to them and to challenge the viewer to question our everyday experien
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