Friday, June 3, 2011

digital reflections 2




  • 02hide&seek Photoshop&3dstudiomax, Inkjetprint On Paper
  • 03hide&seek Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper
  • 04hide&seek Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper

01hide&seek Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper

hide&seek Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper


Hide and Seek

This series works with an old childhood album containing photographs of the artist and his family. These yellowing and moth-eaten fragments of frozen moments from the past, enter into a dialogue with the digital, bringing alive the dubious connections between the analogic ‘real’ and the digital. These specular images of the artist’s childhood are digitally ‘mastered’ here – erased, cut up, duplicated, scribbled over, superimposed.. In a way, they extend themselves, like from the past into the present, from the analog into the digital plane. New digital objects in the form of miniature animals finds their habitat in this world; they nuzzle themselves into the empty hands of kids, peep into the old tin boxes that contain photographs, while a cockroach (yet another superimposed image) nibbles at them.. New skies take over as backdrops, the scars and bruises on the body, magnified digitally, re-live both pain and memory. The uncle in uniform dominates the foreground, like in the artist’s childhood, who is relegated to the background, or is taking refuge behind the bars of the digital. The artist, playing hide and seek with different media, constantly shies away from the brutal frontality of the photograph. He uses the digital planes to hide his face; he doodles on them, or soften them. It is a ploy that works both ways, for it is both a hiding as well as a revealing, a way to ‘bring one’s self in’ to the image. What is also brought into the foreground is the materiality and hence the transience/fragility of the photographic medium itself. We find visible signs of wear and tear, of time eating its way upon/through it. In one of the images we find the moth-eaten parts of the photographs digitally magnified, and in another, an all too real cockroach is working at a photo.

Surfaces collide, analog and digital, past and present, one and two-dimensional, personal and public, memory and forgetting, real and virtual.

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