After several failed attempts to create a new cohesive body of work for this show, I went back to my roots. It's a project I haven't entirely been taking seriously until just a few weeks ago and now I can finally offer you guys some insight to my process and the product.
Lets start at the beginning...
I started making "collages" following our graduation for a couple of reasons. 1. The loss of facilities (space suitable for clay work, kilns, wood shops, etc.) and 2. because of my newly incurred student loan debt. Without tools, space or money I started looking more towards paper based processes. I had the tools and I had a table, I knew I could make it work. I bought about 20 sheets of 15"x15" inch watercolor paper and it sat untouched for a long time. If you have ever sat in front of a blank sheet of paper you know the soulless bitch she can be. A blindingly white, black hole... a vortex capable of sucking your imagination dry...a desert, a cannibal, a sink hole. You get it.
In need of inspiration, I went to my local thrift stores and started going through their book sections. I would grab old encyclopedias and other books that had a lot of visual information in them. I tended to grab books that were about 20 years old or more. The quality of the colors in these older images was really attractive to me. Vintage like, kind of stagnate and definitely not from a contemporary printer. I would tear through these books, pulling any images that struck me for any reason. I have a poly-envelope filled with these images now.
THE REAL WORK
With my stock pile of images I begin to play around. My "collages" tend to actually consist of only 2 or 3 photos. By combining just a couple images I find that a lot more information starts to reveal itself with in each individual image. Though each photo has been extracted from its original context, the co-image begin to develop an entirely new context. There combinations can do a number of things, some of them below.
1. Create a narrative
2. Create a dichotomy
3. Reveal an underlying theme
4. Tell a joke
5. All of the above...
What the coupling does for each viewer is different and to me it doesn't matter how it affects the viewer, just that it has. The response simply acknowledges that I have successfully given these images a second chance, a new light. I admit that I have an initial idea when I first combine them and it is definitely not arbitrary. Sometimes it might be more obvious then others but either way, I don't think I will insinuate anything to the viewer via the title. To each his own.
Offering a second home to "left for dead" images was something that I came to on my own but here is an interesting project going on in NYC. It's basically a library full of dead books, discarded by libraries and other institutions but reclaimed by and for artists. It's called the Reanimation Library.
http://www.reanimationlibrary.org/index
Let me give you guys an example from the newest of my Left for Dead series. The following images are mostly pulled from 1987 National Geographic magazines. Kind of to commemorate there 25th Anniversary bound into a magazine that everyone keeps but rarely looks back in to.
So in this series I pulled the images, matched them, scanned them on to my computer and then digitally collaged them. I did this so I could reprint them on a larger scale. By increasing the scale I can take them out of the magazine context. The size isn't handleable, its approachable. In addition I wanted to print them onto a translucent paper. If you are familiar with Duralar or Mylar, imagine their frosted/matte papers, the paper I am printing on is very similar but has a little more tooth and is actually cotton based, not a plastic. This kind of foggy paper calls to the ghost of the image. My plan is to have 10 to 12 of these pieces and to hang them at a small distance from the gallery walls, another way to let them behave in a ghostly manner. I will post more as I have finished them.
Sorry for the delay folks.
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