Digital media senior Amanda Chaplin has been putting together pieces of New York, Boston and Miami, creating photos that look like they were taken in one place, but have been puzzled together with buildings and aspects from each of the cities.

“I take tons of pictures of everything,” Chaplin said. “I take about 5,000 pictures [while visiting a city], pick 15 of my favorites and create one photo.”

The concentration of Chaplin’s main body of work, as inspired by Jerry Uelsmann, is printmaking as well as manipulated photographic pieces leads her to spend around seven hours on each one of her city photographs, aligning parts of each selected piece to create the illusions of a single architectural landscape. In this process, called masking,  she has complete control over how each individual image layer of the  project looks.  Some of the artwork Chaplin creates emulates hyperrealism,  aiming to create seamless cityscapes with buildings from multiple cities placed into one scene. However, others are made to look more futuristic. For her innovation, she has recently won the Women In The Visual Arts award for one of her cityscape pieces. The piecewhich is vibrant and full of movement features a mixture of Miami buildings, New York streets and Boston landscape with a river running through the streets, to add to the futuristic feel of the work. By choosing to leave this, like many of her works, untitled Chaplin  allows each observer to gather whatever message they want from her art without the creative obstructions.

“I don’t name my pieces, naming them could infer something about the piece that may not be true,” Chaplin said.

In the coming year Chaplin will continue working on her concentrations and her work will be available for viewing while on display in building nine.

To view more of Amanda’s artwork visit her Flickr page here.