Kira Sampurno

My research project explores our immediate built environment, focusing in particular on vernacular architecture. I use vibrant colours in my work in order to present an alternative perspective of these ordinary, everyday buildings that we have come to be so familiar with. Though my photographs are initially inspired by the 1975 exhibition titled _New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape_ and their concern of finding beauty in the banal, my images extend this and put emphasis in colour. Through my apparent use of Photoshop to highlight and heighten the colours in my work, it is my intention that my photographs hover between the familiar and the unfamiliar; realism and abstraction. In this way, my work aims to guide the viewer’s eyes off a familiar track and opens them up to what new perspectives of the built environment can do to our perceptions of our existing New Zealand vernacular architecture.