This series starts with a selection of images from my archive of photographs taken from printed media, mostly magazines and books. I reassemble and rephotograph these found images as objects in a studio. Source material includes images of hands in gestures of labor and images of artifacts from the do-it-yourself history of photography, science, and technology that became popular in the last century and continues through today. These images reference a ritual of the analogue at the point when labor and leisure begin to merge. It’s a strange phenomenon that proves to be a harbinger for a yearning for better times, so removed now are we from the actual physical doing things…
I locate analog source material using keyword searches within digital networks, that is to say, Ebay searches. And so my studio acts as mediator between analog and digital. In recent bodies of work the studio for me has merged experience and anticipation and now, in a tangential manner, the paradoxical relationship between substitute and original moves into play, this is reinforced by built stands and other methods of display: are they image or picture of object.
The images are decontextualized in this staged studio setting and any hint of narrative becomes open-ended, intersecting and looping back into the constant rush of visual information. No more and no less coherent, but perhaps they become an occasional marker or anchor, fixed for a moment. I aim to construct a disjointed and disorienting mashup based in a loose way around the acts of seeing and doing, observation and gesture, and the photographic image.