Infra-Realism
Melbourne based photographer, Kate Ballis, creates a surreal dreamscape of Palm Springs with an infrared Sony camera and a handful of colored filters while attending Modernist Week in February 2017. Her Infra-realism series highlights a new perspective on the much famed desert scapes and mid–20th century architecture that she has visited many times before. Kate’s photographs produce vivid purples, pinks, blues, and reds to re-enchant the over-exposed city she had once found as her muse. Much of these photos capture iconic locations such as the Swiss Miss home, Palm Springs Tennis Club, The Parker Hotel, and the Ace Hotel & Swim Club. Kate Ballis expresses the city through fresh eyes by emphasizing texture that was only found through infrared. Since Palm Springs, her Infra-Realism series has brought her to other locations such as Joshua Tree National Park, Sedona, Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Salar de Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia.
Mod Infra-Realism
Kate Ballis’ Infra-Realism series provides powerfully seductive photographs that transform everyday southern California archetypes—modernist architecture, pools, vintage cars and desert scenes— into otherworldly candy-colored dreamscapes. The artist reimagines iconic Palm Springs locations as a surreal world in which succulents and palm trees depicted in vibrant hues of blue, skies are rich magenta, and swimming pools blood red. The contrasting, high-spirited colors illuminate the textures of the lush foilage that once blended into the desert landscape. The hyper-saturated images subvert the desert city’s previously muted landscape into mysteriously alluring, joyously alive technicolor fantasias, creating an unsettling ambiguity, an otherworldliness in which the viewer questions reality and the world around oneself. Ballis offers a glimpse into the unknown, an uninhabited distant planet or parallel universe, at once strange and familiar.
