Flatness of Face

 

Ink Jet Print

34" x 65"

2014

 

In "Chromophobia Ancient and Modern", David Batchelor talked about how color is often devalued in art. Color plays the subordinate role while more emphasis is put on form. It is often uncooperative and always subjective. Being inspired by Art Wolfe's "Human Canvas" and Alexa Meade's portfolio of work, I decided to use color as a mask to see how color collapses a subject. I decided to use an easily identifiable form, the face, and painted an organic pattern on it. Using the face as a canvas, I produced a 3D painting that confuses how the eye processes objects in space. By then photographing the 3 dimensional form, I flattened it into a 2 dimensional image, I then printed the image out, painted on the image, scanned the new image and proceeded to mesh the two images together just to add to the confusion.

 

 

The name of our assignment was "Overloaded Color Tableau". Our requirements were to overwhelm the frame with color keeping in mind that the print would be a tableau. Tableaus are, "designed and produced for the wall, summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and consumed" (Jean-François Chevrier). The size of a tableau image distances the viewer from the object; it makes the viewer stand back from the print in order to absorb it all, it's confrontational. By combining a form collapsed because of color with the obtrusiveness of a tableau image I aimed to create a theatrical abstract photograph that the viewer can't help but stare at, contemplating what the form it is that they are looking at.