Body is the first part of a group of images that continues with the Body Modifications series.
This is a group of cut paper and digital collages with source material such as medical texts, magazines, advertisements, art history, and my own photographs. I am interested in the uncanny results of bodies and body parts rearranged and redesigned. These works are recontextualizations of familiar shapes, textures, colors, and gestures. With them I explore issues including sexuality, attraction, desirability, body image, disease, surgery, and the grotesque. The medium of collage allows me to play with textures and edges on the image plane and also with interactions of forms beneath the surface. I enjoy the tactility and immediacy of paper, but I also like the flexibility and a variety of output options I get with a computer. Making the collages is a way for me to explore the shapes and gestures of the bodies and the original source images.
When familiar things and images are taken out of context they take on new lives isolated from or combined with other shapes. In some cases mirroring and repetition can transform simple fragments into complex patterns of shapes, lines, and curves. In other cases I meld and sculpt parts to create new forms - familiar but not quite real - that play tricks on the mind and on the paper.
Innocent source material can suggest something more sinister whereas the dirtiest of pictures can provide the sweetest, most poetic gestures. As composer, I am responsible for my composition and layout but I prefer to let the pictures navigate themselves as much as possible.
I believe that to become more comfortable with life and living it is absolutely necessary to bring to light and discuss as fully as possible the many human cultural hang-ups and confused perceptions of bodies and body parts. I am amazed at the beauty and intricacy of bodies and the delicate mechanics that make us function, and also at the abnormalities and peculiarities that may remind us of our mortality. At once we are just so much meat on bones, but at the same time we are living, breathing, conscious beings, and all of that meat is arranged in subtle structures that enable action, gesture, consciousness and life. My artwork is one attempt to confront these issues of the body.
Thumbnails and images will be up soon...
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