Dries Lips

As a contemporary alchemist, Dries Lips tries to grasp the world around him. His work is the result of trying to see beyond the appearance of things, of the attempt to go to their ‘infra’-structure.

Photography is hereby used as a tool, but often also becomes the subject. Can we use photography to go beyond the materiality of the processes that define the world? Can photography capture these processes? Can photography be a way to process and perform a series of mechanical or chemical operations in order to change or preserve these processes?

What about the latest photographic technologies in capturing and reproducing? What is their potential? Is 3D scanning and printing the logical next step in the developing history of photography?

In the long alchemist tradition, oppositions were always very important. In opposition to the newest and most advanced photographic technologies, Dries places one of the oldest and most basic natural processes: the transition of water from a solid to a liquid state.

Dries Lips (Ghent, 1983) studied architecture at the University of Ghent and  in 2008 earned a master’s degree in Film and Visual Culture from the University of Antwerp. From 2010 to 2015 he studied Fine Arts photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Antwerp), St. Lucas Scholl of Arts, Antwerp,  and Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent. In his personal projects, Dries tries to capture the inconceivable. He goes beyond the appearance of things by focussing on processes. Through this quest, Dries is also questioning the medium of photography. Can photography be a way to process processes? This topic is the subject of his master’s degree in Visual Arts at the St. Lucas School of Arts.