Maybe...
I left a blank spot at the bottom of my business cards, thinking I'd add a small photo of recent work, but instead I've been doing little collages on them. Here's a photo of a finished batch, done while hanging out at my dad's house yesterday. I suppose this production method will eventually prove unrealistic but for now people seem to find them charming and unusual.
Photo from a poster and tape-covered pole just off the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. I took several really fun images, cropping in camera, to get compositions that I liked. The layers of tape are unusual in my experience -- typically I encounter staples. But the layers of tape catch the light in an interesting way.
Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the Open Shelf Book Club at the Museum of Contemporary Art | Denver. Jasper de Beijer was discussing books and media that have influenced his work, now on view in the museum's Paper Works Gallery. The book he selected for our discussion next time is Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine... he talked about the one-dimensional thinking it exposes and mentioned that it is a somewhat difficult read. He said it was like "staring into the abyss of the soul..."
Several of us went up to the gallery afterwards and saw the show. His work is amazing. It was great to be able to ask him questions about his process. He builds representations of something that interests him and that he has studied -- using digital imagery, modelling, and some collage techniques -- and then photographs the models. Some of his models are on display along with a lot of the photographs. I was most taken with a series of 3-dimensional heads that he had collaged imagery onto -- busts of men who had suffered shell shock in WWI. The patched-together, collaged, 3D heads are quite interesting themselves but the photographic treatment flattens the imagery and really conveys their wounds and emptiness. The photo at top left is a detail from one of the heads to show how the imagery is joined... he said he mostly uses spray adhesive. If you click here, you can see his body of work and the larger image this detail comes from.
He talked a lot about our dis-association with photographed images from history. "...de Beijer has been reconstructing imagery that has become autonomous in the course of history, using existing sources to create a new reality." So then, what is "real"?
I just posted the whole series of collages from a commission I did a couple of years ago for the Denver Seminary's library to a new (to me) artists' registry, Artist-Listing. There were 10 pieces, 20 x 20", that responded to the elements of creation: Sky/Air, Earth, Light, Water, and Animate Creation. I did two abstract pieces that related to each concept in a non-denominational way. "Sky 1," pictured here, is the first piece in the series that I finished. Anyway, if you click on the link above, you can see all of them.