Inanimate Objects

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igital image files are “inanimate objects.” Digital image files are the source of
most of these prints. In a Dadaist gesture of appropriation, they have been
removed from their original electronic context — databases of images
specifically meant to be viewed on a computer monitor for a specific purpose —
and placed into another context, one created by me. The files have been
reorganized or manipulated to produce a second (or third or fourth or fifth)
digital file, and combined with other digital files within the same pictorial frame
to become a representational, though altered, record of their content.

As an exploration of the 21st century trend toward “virtual” relationships via
social networking web sites, these images also engage the idea that a traditional
“personal” connection or association between an artist and his subject is
unnecessary. They can “interface” electronically, the “sitter” quite unaware of
the artist’s existence, who is then free to create a new kind of authorship, and
invent a new meaning for “meaning.” Utilizing the iconography of
pornographic imagery pulled from its original, often notorious context, and
reinserting it into a context more benign, these images offer an alternative
solution to the issue of how we wish to be represented, of who we are. We can
transform truth, and thus call into question the truthfulness of representation
and of truthfulness itself.

The issue of who one is becomes speculative, thrown into question. One can
formulate one's identity (for good or ill) to suit whatever purpose one has in
mind: to acquaint, to be recognized, to deceive, to invent. To paraphrase Sartre,
We are what we are not, we are not what we are. We often define ourselves, or
allow others to define us, based on certain characteristics, usually physical or
behavioral, frequently boiled down to how “pretty” or “beautiful” or
“handsome” or “normal” we are, or allow others to convince us we are.
(Pornography traffics in the “beautiful,” and the idea that only the “beautiful”
can participate, and so tries to convince its casual, or serious, audience that
they are “beautiful,” and so will be allowed to participate, even if only through
the medium of a computer monitor.) Our surface, what we are not, is all we
allow to show. Often, what is not visible, what we are, we maintain in deeply
hidden regions of our psychology. We allow other people (Sartre: “Hell...is other
people.”) to determine our value as human entities in a wildly, at times,
indeterminate world. Is this good? Is this bad? It just is.

A final note on theory: By isolating traditional portrait techniques / styles and
extracting them from the comfort zone of familiar portrait strategies and art-
historical contexts, these images adhere to Maurice Denis’ idea that before a
work of art, such as a painting, can be said to be any kind of representation of
any object, it is first and “essentially a flat surface covered with colors
assembled in a certain order.” The subjects have uprooted from their flesh and
blood existence, if they ever had one, by an imaging process that reinvents
them by placing them into a “reality” above and beyond the reality of their
actual physical existence.

The series begins with a group of straight black and white images from which
the color images were derived.