Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

ABSTRACT 
Drawing from a background in graphic arts, I revive gesture and memory through a painstaking process of physical and digital appropriation, manipulation, and composition. A perplexing, composite identity is generated as process and design collide with personal history and psycho-visual patterns of restraint and abandon.

I began digitally documenting my drawings and 2-dimensional art several years ago for archival purposes. Early on in the task I became interested in the  fragments and artifacts that seemed to be a by-product of this process. Furthermore, I envisioned opportunities for new works that combine and manipulate these captures. Recently exhibited works are reflections on mark-making, mediation, stylization, and time.

For this series of monotypes, I scan parts of drawings I have made over the course of the last 25-30 years, manipulate the resulting images with digital software, output the image on paper, then retouch and augment the prints by hand using conventional media. A drawing forms the initial layer of pieces that emphasize figuration.

Discovering identity in an image-saturated culture demands new strategies of visualization and discovery for artists trained in the plastic arts. Images surround and define the human condition in myriad ways. 

These compositions are constructed of memory and gesture. A cycle of physical to digital to physical again becomes a random image generator.  They synthesize illustration techniques, comic styles, calligraphy, and especially indiscriminate marks on scrap paper. The randomness of those ancillary drawings evokes the colliding and sometimes ruinous nature of visually transmitted material in our world today.