ART

This is a series of digital collages made by combining found vernacular photographs. I tended to only combine two photographs together to create a new seemingly seamless image. This example combines and beach scene with a highway scene that replaces the ocean.

The nude male is from a found slide and inserted under the scratches on the damaged cheetah photo found on the street.

The collaged element in this photo of the pigs is found under the yellow boot in the fire pit in the foreground.

I inserted a second photograph in the fire pit, as if it were disposed of but somehow escaped the flames. This photo was found on the refrigerator of a friend and depicts a mutual friend holding a shotgun in his backyard in 1995. This gun belonged to his father and grandfather before him who were also police officers. This mutual friend went on to become a police officer as well. All though nothing in the artwork will reveal this information, I chose to insert this particular photo to address or make sense of the two pigs in the background.

The novelty speech bubble sticker contains the hand written words “Fuck you”. To make this detail legible, I printed this collage at 4 x 6 feet, which made this inserted photo just under 3 x 5 inches. In this way, this collage became more sculptural in its use of scale, engaging the viewer in a near/far experience while also challenging them to scrutinize every detail of what appears to be a simple wildlife scene.

Two images here are combined vertically in the middle; flower on the left and man holding beer on the right. Read as a single photo, it seems taken from the perspective of a person on a date with the man on the right who just handed them a flower.

I very much identified with the child in the photograph. Christmas time for me was always filled with anxiety. The collaged element in this photograph is an object falling off the table in top right corner.

This inserted element is a full urine sample bottle I saw on the street and photographed. Here it is falling off the table, a symbol of anxiety about to cause disaster on what is supposed to be the happiest day of the year. For me, it was always the most judgmental time of the year.

The collaged elements here are the two Polaroids and the portrait head shot under the cushion. Like the image of the pigs, this picture had to be printed at a large enough size to make the smaller inserted photographs legible. Often, the size photographs are printed seems arbitrary or standardized, but in some of my collages, the scale of the print is determined by the content in the picture.

In this collage, I combine a found photo with a photograph I took. The found photo is of the child staring out the window of a ferry boat. He is now gazing into a living room scene where two males are passed out, seemingly from drinking. I took this voyeuristic photograph in the early morning hours, drawn to the window while on LSD. In this collage, we become the child gazing in wonder into what seems like a laboratory containing these sleeping two men.

In this collage, I do not attempt to hide the seam. It combines two photographs of the same child in different scenarios; in one he jumps into a pool, in the other he soaks his head under a water pump in a desert island themed park with a sunken ship. I joined them by connecting the edge of the pool with the edge of the park’s sand fill, as if the pool and the park were sharing the same space. The incoherence of this combination lends a sort of dream logic to the scene, as if we are experiencing the non-linear structured memory of the child.

Here is another example where I do not attempt to hide the seam. In this case, the scene relates more to teenaged memories of skateboarding and learning how to drive.

This collage combines a photo of someone gazing at the ocean through binoculars with a negative print of a WWE wrestling match appearing as toxic clouds or an explosion on the horizon.

This collage combines a postcard of the statue of Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini with a photo of a man squirting ketchup on a hot dog. It was printed as a multiple at 4x6 inches, postcard size.

The red postage printed dots on the postcard double as drops and particulate of ketchup.

Combined with the gory depiction of blood and violence in the statue, the application of ketchup to the hot dog becomes equally violent, especially considering his apparent indifference to the statue and his ecstatic grin at his hot dog. Just as Medusa is subjected to the cold discretion of Perseus, the statues of art history are often subjected to the cold indifference of the tourist. Like Perseus, he cannot look at the statue directly, but rather consumes its violence indirectly in the form of a banal hot dog snack.

The decision to photograph this statue from an angle that hides the genitalia is a subtle form of art historical sanitization, yet the genitals are arguably the least controversial or visceral element of the statue. My inclusion of a man eating a hot dog is also a way to draw attention to this hidden body part.