Set against the backdrop of the American Southwest, Liminal Spaces is a symbolic exploration of the anxieties faced in middle-class contemporary America. The work combines reality and fiction to delve into the American experience and examine the shared anxieties that unite and divide us. Liminal Spaces can be seen as the point between lament and unease, serving as both a windshield and a rearview mirror.
The project’s motivation is to emulate the great American literaries of the 20th Century through a visual medium. Liminal Spaces adapts the camera akin to Jack Karouac’s use of his Underwood. It is the new poetry for the 21st Century, visually analyzing our time and place through autobiographical fiction.
A dual national of the USA and Canada, Juan Carlos Correa considers himself 100% Yankee. He chooses the American SW as his home because of its metaphorical significance for our American Manifest Destiny and the plight of the middle class, where we are constantly stuck on a promise of a paradise just over yonder. The primary goal within his work is to emulate the great American authors, such as Kerouac, Steinbeck, O’Neil, and Miller. It is a new language for the post-humanist generation, the narcissists, who are paralyzed by the beauty of their reflection.
Armed with his mirrorless camera, Correa captures the spirit of our nation’s current epoch in all its disordered anxieties, depicting characters trapped in a dichotomy of hanging on to a fading past and rushing to an uncertain future. He considers himself a philosopher as much as a cinematographer/ photographer. He is a storyteller, propelling myths through his mise-en-scène.
Correa obtained his undergraduate degree in cinematic studies from the University of New Mexico and has completed his MFA in photography through the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.