What A Long Strange Trip It's Been
There are obvious parallels between the decade of the 1960s up to the present. America is still fighting a war, experiencing domestic unrest, international crisis, and has just elected the youngest president since the Kennedy administration. These similarities are presented in my photographic series highlighting comparisons through found internet images chosen for their iconic value, be it political, social, or pop cultural.
Using 21st century color and digital scans in combination with the 20th century photographic process of collage coined by artists such as Max Ernest, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters, I create large color and black and white photograms. Visually introducing themes from now and then, contact printing my large collages-as-negatives directly onto light sensitive paper.
The photogram was a Victorian process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1834. He placed objects such as lace and leaves onto a piece of sensitized paper and exposed it to sunlight, creating a print of the object with a negative outline. The photogram as well as collage, agit prop, and the 1960s changed the world. I created my own photographs with this in mind. My choice of artistic expression include colored transparencies and mixed media materials such as paint, paper, and string, to create my own large-scale negative and contact print conveying the chaotic, psychedelic nuances that existed half a century ago. The only relationship my photograms have to Talbot is the contact printing.
The period of the Vietnam War with American history, culture, and lifestyle that surrounded it has always intrigued me. Inspiration comes to me from both contemporary and preceding music as well as alluding to 1930s German collage artist John Heartfield and his anti-Nazi intent. Collages can include newspaper clippings, colored paper, photographs or anything else. A collage is a work of art constructed from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new piece. I’m angry and terrified of the repercussions we face from the last presidential legacy and
I want my work to illustrate this angst.
Although each piece is politically charged, in the bigger picture the work expresses the classic historical archetypes of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, positive vs. negative, black vs. white. Each piece sends a message begging the viewer to challenge and change what America has become. Americans in 2008 and 2009 are left facing a similar dilemma as the Americans of the 1960s. The election, climate, economic, fuel, and “terrorist” crisis make it a pivotal point in history where the America we know could become something else. []
Using 21st century color and digital scans in combination with the 20th century photographic process of collage coined by artists such as Max Ernest, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters, I create large color and black and white photograms. Visually introducing themes from now and then, contact printing my large collages-as-negatives directly onto light sensitive paper.
The photogram was a Victorian process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1834. He placed objects such as lace and leaves onto a piece of sensitized paper and exposed it to sunlight, creating a print of the object with a negative outline. The photogram as well as collage, agit prop, and the 1960s changed the world. I created my own photographs with this in mind. My choice of artistic expression include colored transparencies and mixed media materials such as paint, paper, and string, to create my own large-scale negative and contact print conveying the chaotic, psychedelic nuances that existed half a century ago. The only relationship my photograms have to Talbot is the contact printing.
The period of the Vietnam War with American history, culture, and lifestyle that surrounded it has always intrigued me. Inspiration comes to me from both contemporary and preceding music as well as alluding to 1930s German collage artist John Heartfield and his anti-Nazi intent. Collages can include newspaper clippings, colored paper, photographs or anything else. A collage is a work of art constructed from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new piece. I’m angry and terrified of the repercussions we face from the last presidential legacy and
I want my work to illustrate this angst.
Although each piece is politically charged, in the bigger picture the work expresses the classic historical archetypes of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, positive vs. negative, black vs. white. Each piece sends a message begging the viewer to challenge and change what America has become. Americans in 2008 and 2009 are left facing a similar dilemma as the Americans of the 1960s. The election, climate, economic, fuel, and “terrorist” crisis make it a pivotal point in history where the America we know could become something else. []
