Eddee Daniel

Synecdoche: The fragment that represents the whole

Synecdoche is a literary device in which the part represents the whole. My photographs are meant to be visual examples of synecdoche. My subject is nature and the complex—often paradoxical—relationships I see between nature and culture. My approach, using the part to represent the whole, is to symbolize the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment.

I am interested in how we perceive nature and its relationship with human impacts upon the land and I am attracted to the contradictory realities I perceive in a world where nature is increasingly transformed, reduced and abstracted. I focus on how we use natural features in manufactured landscapes to compensate for cultural alienation from nature. Homo Sapiens evolved in the natural landscape. I believe that the destruction of that landscape creates in all of us an instinctual anxiety. My work deals with the tension that this creates.

Many images contain a vestige of nature in an architectural setting. Some express the exuberance of nature juxtaposed with an artificial feature. In either case, they are meant to be fragments of the whole subject—fragments that evoke something larger. Ultimately, there are no boundaries between the human and the natural. 

This series evolved from another body of work called the Urban Wilderness Project, which explores a similar theme, contradictions between wilderness and civilization. In Synecdoche the concept is distilled, the compositions refined. The square format is a geometric shape rarely found in nature. Abstract geometries resist the illusion of three-dimensional space. Paradoxically, they also are concrete, rooted inescapably in the real world. I want these images to teeter between abstraction and realism to express the tensions between order and disorder, civilization and wilderness that I see as central to the human condition.

All images are available as 16 x 16" and 20 x 20" pigment prints in editions of 10, ranging in price from $950 (small) to $1200 (large). There are some exceptions.