Way back in week 3 I was experimenting with layers – something I got interested in after reading about Thomas Vanoost‘s work over on 52 Frames.
Vanoost takes pictures of the same space from slightly different angles a short time apart, and uses these in layers to illustrate the chaos of the city. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but it did get me thinking about what I could use layers for. I thought about using photos taken at the start and end of a journey to illustrate the journey as a whole, and tried this out with some shots I took one day of two stations along the U6 metro line. This was the result:
I have since discovered the work of Rita Nanni who spent years taking pictures of the end stations of the various underground lines in NYC. Although she doesn’t use layers, it’s nice to see that there are others out there thinking about the starting and ending of journeys.
Back to layers…
While putting together my reflective presentation, I was reminded of collage work I did over ten years ago. It was a short phase, but I enjoyed playing with magazines as my starting materials, combining pictures and words from different articles in the same edition in a mostly intuitive process to see what would emerge. Here’s one of my old efforts:
I got talking to one of my fellow students about maybe delving back into collage work, and he sent me some links to collage artists to explore, including John Stezaker, Daniel Gordon and Lorna Simpson.
Through talking with our tutor and through exploring myself, I’ve discovered many more artists working with photos in collage work, or even as part of sculptural photographic work. I was particularly fascinated by the works of Lebohang Kganye, Lou Peralta and Jason Chen. Even if I do not go down the line of collage or 3D work for this project, these artists have provided me with lots of inspiration for other projects. I’m especially thinking of Peralta’s and Chen’s wover work and the potential for intermeshing two subjects in one piece.
One of the things I’m going to need to dive deeper on if I pursue the collage route, is the question of materials (e.g. adhesives) and technique. Here, there is a very insightful artist talk from Lou Peralta where she describes a lot of her process and some of the materials, adhesives and tools she uses, right down to the name of the brand in some cases. The most important point? If you want work to last a long time and not be ephemeral, you need to make sure you are using archival materials.
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