...Polaroid Epitaphs: Series



This series was created for a grop show back in July of 2008... they were intended to be "studies"... simple pieces for some bigger project? But, they took on a life of their own... mundane, almost boring at times? I felt that the typewriter added some sense of the personal, just by the nature of how the ink sits on the paper... smudges, etc. With that said, I had no intention to continue the series. I had put the series to rest, but given my new diagnosis, found it poignant. Therefore, I have "resurected" the series, and will continue to work on it.
About the show:
For the month of August six New York artist + six Chicago Artists explore DEATH+EXTINCTION via the soon-to-be-extinct medium of the Polaroid. For one weekend in June, Chicago artists traveled to New York to work alongside New York artists. Their mission was to individually create a Polaroid project themed around "Death/Extinction".
About the series:
The final image is not the process, but a result of discovery. The process involves digging and bargaining, scavenging, cutting and pasting; it is antiquarian mysticism. It is the fabrication of memory. Photos are lost, mixed and jumbled into shoe boxes or crates; their precise language has been confused. They make their way from attics and living rooms into parking lots and online auctions. At the flea market, the sellers of these orphaned stories barely understand the language. Their artifacts scream over the pavement and under the sun. I salvage Polaroid's from this world. Once collected, I apply my own fiction to these lost photos through collage and text. For each Polaroid, I construct a defining narrative. -a succinct epitaph. The epitaph provides insight into how this person, or thing, may have lived and died. Each Polaroid is altered through collage, or physical manipulation, which supports the epitaph assigned. Stories emerge against the backdrop of emulsion, scotch-tape and typewriter ink. He who was once at war will remember... She, now divorced, is married again. Her name is... His name is... they'll find their own names, or, they'll find their faces scratched out, their world scratched out; reconstruction is not always pretty or kind. Intimacy is revealed in the fragments found and cut, remembering the 1/60th of a second when the shutter clicked. ...and the 90 seconds before the peel, before the shake... waiting to find out how it all might appear. (this is technically an expansion of another series started years ago....)

Links:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tickets to Germany: Bad Berka

On the refrigerator...

...a long winded story not written all that well.