Bulgy was the name of my first pet, a shimmering black goldfish with globular eye balls and hyper inflated cheeks. Fluttering around his bowl with pathetic useless fins, he was as unreal as he was fascinating. Perhaps the only natural thing about the ridiculous and beautiful creature was that he died when I forgot to feed him. There was something about the falseness of this small animal that was so appealing. Goldfish (Carassius auratus) are, afterall, as synthetic as Dolly the Sheep. Once long ago, in a pond far, far away, their ancestors lived as part of a natural food chain, but generations of selective cross-breeding by ichtheologists have created the made-to-order critters we are so familiar with today. These are animals whose only role in life is to please the capricious aesthetic desires of man and child.

One manchild in particular. Dirk Westphal uses subjects in his photographs as seemingly banal and commonplace as goldfish, lap dogs, snackcakes, mouthwashes and cold medicines to examine man-made beauty. His photographs delve into the biological manipulations of our pets’ physical appearances and the industrial alchemy that results in remarkably artificial hues in medicines and prefabricated deserts. Through macro attention, monumental presentation and backlit luminosity, these works demand that we stop glossing over the constructed nature of our modern world and take a moment to see and think about the incredible degree of visual control our species injects into the characteristics of everyday objects such as foods, medicines, and even our pets.

Paradoxically, Westphal’s current body of work projects a verfremdungseffekt – a sense of alienation – at the same time that it draws in viewers with freakish sublime beauty. Isolating goldfish completely from any semblance of environment, he estranges the creatures from notions of normalcy, even from the expected false habitat of the fish tank. Going to great lengths to rid the tank water of even the smallest particles, he achieves a pure and distraction-free medium in which we can encounter the fish directly. Yet these animals are not specimens, dissected and presented for scientific examination. They are very much alive when they are photographed and swim with the kind of fluid grace one would expect from the subject of a Jacques Cousteau film. Laid bare on white or solid colored backgrounds, the fish are offered in a manner reminiscent of product photography, such as advertisements for cosmetics or automobiles, and they gaze back to seduce us with their variegated patterns, luminously scaled complexions, and awkward grimaces. With bulbous eyes and pouting mouths, they stare stupidly into the camera’s lens with frightened and puzzled uncertainty, oblivious of their surroundings and purpose as we admire their splendor which has been exaggerated for our attention by the dynamic scale of the photograph and its lucent and even lighting.

Fish are not used metaphorically in Westphal’s work as they are in Damien Hirst’s Love Lost and Lost Love sculptures; they do not allude to modern scientific paradigms but rather encourage closer looking at seemingly banal objects. Westphal asks us to see and think about how these and many other objects have come to clutter and fill the spaces in our lives. He wants us to be aware of their presence, stop taking them for granted, and consider the care their creators have taken to design them so they will mesh seamlessly with our desires.

In the Cough Syrups and Mouthwashes series (1998-1999), the body of work that directly precedes the Fish series (2000-2004), this endeavor is more blatant as Westphal examines artificial coloration and consistency engineered for many of the most obviously synthetic liquids we consume. By photographing these liquids as they lay still in shallow pools on flat bottomed containers, he makes us think about where the hell these substances come from. Who chose that particular shade of red for Triaminic DM Berry, anyway? And how did they make it that thick, viscous consistency? Was there a team of lab technicians laboring for years to design the perfect characteristics for these products? And how is it that every bottle of Triaminic DM sold worldwide has the exact same color, flavor, consistency, and smell? While the beauty of the goldfish results from selective breeding and is created in a more haphazard and bio-morphic manner, these liquids are manipulated chemically with strict control. Westphal not only delineates the unnoticed and inherent physical beauty of these substances, but asks us to consider the conscious effort that was required to arrive at these finished products. In their large lightbox format, these images are at once Barnett Newman-esque colorfield abstraction photographs, Dan Flavin inspired tinted florescent light sculptures, Warholian Pop homages to consumerism, and object studies derived from a Realist tradition of rendering everyday folk-culture tools and materials without romanticism or glamorization.

The very nature and pervasiveness of visual language in our culture is delineated in Westphal’s Snackcakes series (1996-1997). “…Let them eat cake!” these photographs vociferate. Refashioning prepackaged corner-store snack cakes into instantly recognizable bank logos and then presenting the results with a German sense of clarity and perfectionism, Westphal (who grew up in Columbus, Ohio but spent much of his childhood with family in the backwoods of Ostfriesland, Germany) delves into structures of corporate identity and the influence they have had in training consumers to a high level of visual literacy. But along the way, the signal these corporate entities seek to project encounters static and the lines carrying their messages are crossed with volksproducts like the industrially baked goods which lie at the proletariat feeding point of the capitalist system. Westphal re-fashions cheap sugary treats like Sno Balls, Ring-Dings, Ho-Hos, and Twinkies into the highly recognizable formal icons used by giant entities such as Nike and Chase Manhattan Bank. Much as Tom Sachs, his contemporary and frequent collaborator, has combined various layers of consumer stratification through cunning appropriation of visual identity, Westphal spins intriguing cultural criticisms with Zen-like simplicity via single figure rebus poems. All the while, the intrinsic and consciously controlled aesthetic characteristics of the logos and mass-fabricated foods rise to awareness, where we as consumers – of the products and photographs alike – admire their beauty and glistening artificiality.

“I stop to look at things for a long time,” Westphal explains of his process, “and let them turn into other things.” This way of looking at the world leads the artist, like Vik Muniz and Tom Friedman, to use oddball materials that are easily recognizable but rendered unfamiliar in their current manifestations via recombination and recontextualization. The products he uses are always natural to his domestic home/studio environment, though they are decommissioned from their intended use. They are offered with all the Irving Penn-style lucidity Westphal can muster and invite viewers to see them with a more penetrating gaze than is normally possible. “I try to tweak the realness of life until it pops,” he says. What results from the snap crackle and pop of his photographs is a revelation of the undetected beauty inherent in much human endeavor.