Parsley Steinweiss creates photographic objects that investigate the experience of perception. She mounts her photographs onto shaped Plexiglas and layers these pieces to make objects that exist between image and sculpture, transforming photographs from representations into physical materials. The photographs themselves range in subject from subtle gradients of sky and atmospheric light to dense surfaces such as wood and stone. Through the layering process, the photos form new relationships, where meaning emerges not from a single image but from their combination.
Through color and the layering of the photographs, she creates shifting relationships that oscillate between flatness and depth, image and object, illusion and physical form. The dimensionality of the pieces create an architecture for the photographs to interact with one another. Sometimes these shapes/planes refer to spaces such as a doorway or a horizon and some are more abstract forms, such as circles. As viewers move around the work, these relationships continually change, making perception itself an active, embodied experience.
At its most basic level, a photograph is a record of light. Steinweiss begins from this premise to examine how photographs mediate what we see, remember, feel and believe. Rather than presenting the photograph as a representation of reality, her work emphasizes its material presence and its role in shaping perception. Expanses of luminous color and constructed spatial depth create environments that feel simultaneously familiar and impossible—places that exist somewhere between observation and imagination. Her pieces invite viewers to linger in this uncertainty, suggesting that perception is never fixed but continually constructed through light, memory, and experience.