As an artist, it’s natural to feel the urge to push creative boundaries and experiment with new mediums. After years of working on my Mazes series, I began to feel limited by its graphic constraints. I needed something different, something tactile and immediate. That’s when I discovered instant photography with Polaroid and Instax cameras.
Before this, I’d been exploring new designs inspired by Japanese Zen gardens—simplistic yet powerful arrangements of lines and circles. These shapes started to evolve into intricate architectures, almost like alien cities emerging from my imagination. Lovecraftian influences were always in the background: the Dyer Expedition, the mysterious cities of Arkham and Innsmouth, and the massive libraries of the Yithians. While experimenting with watercolors and natural pigments helped me bring these ideas to life, I felt the concept needed a modern, hands-on twist.
Instant photography turned out to be the perfect medium. The tactile, ethereal quality of Polaroid film gave each image a dreamlike presence that felt both immediate and otherworldly. But I wanted more than just images—I wanted to merge these imagined “alien structures” with our world.
That’s how the Instant X series was born. Using Posca pens, I drew directly onto the film, layering “alien structures” over real-world scenes. Each manipulated Polaroid became a fragment of an alternate reality, where strange architectures collide with familiar places. The blending of tangible, instant images with drawn elements created a sense of mystery and unease that painting alone couldn’t achieve.
Working with instant photography was refreshing in a digital age where images are so often consumed and discarded. Each piece in Instant X captured a moment in time and place, but the addition of Posca pens added a layer of augmented reality, merging the real with the supernatural.
For a long time, many Instant X pieces remained unseen, stored in albums or boxes as I wrestled with how best to display them. Should they be framed individually, shown as diptychs or triptychs, or arranged in albums? Unable to decide, I set them aside. But as I revisited them recently, I realized that their mysterious, alternate-reality quality made them a perfect fit for Kura Curiosa.
I’m now in the process of integrating them into Kura Curiosa as a special category, likely titled Visions. These images will appear as if they’re distant radio waves lost in space, blurry transmissions captured on some sort of screen. This haunting aesthetic will place them among the other strange and wondrous relics of the Kura, giving viewers a glimpse of an alternate dimension just out of reach.
