The digitalising and pixilation continues. I have been working further with the pixilation ideas and this time with combining the snapshot ideas to produce images that refer and defer in different ways within the same image. I created a grid template derived from the 1cm square increasing in size at regular intervals to restrain the drawing aspect of the cutting and enforce the ‘neutralising’ affects of the technological age. While the squares which form consistent captures of the scene, the defined cut out element (a hand in this one, Digitalised Snapshot 1) signify in a more specific way. The two aspects complement each other as the context is built in the way they both refer outside of the photograph, yet the particular signification of the place is denied and diverted around in an unsettled representation that resists closure (this is a 10 x 15cm snapshot photograph).
I have also been cutting out larger photographs. This one (Hand Cutout) is A4 size and seems to work well on a larger size, though I am not sure where this one is going, but I did return to it and enclosed a 1cm square just below one of the hands, which seems interesting. I think that the pixel on a larger scale works differently and has some potential, so I will work on some more pieces.
Researching put aside I have been making work like frantic and now it is time to start up loading the progress.
I am working on multiple ideas at the moment with work in progress for collages, drawings, installations and more printmaking. This is because I am rationalising my time and also to meet oncoming deadlines and keep the different projects running to the right development needs.
These photocuts are a progression of an idea that developed a while ago and takes a while to work towards completion as the piece needs to be a lot bigger yet. Taking up Virilio’s ideas about the technological age and issues of image saturation in the technological age, these images (snapshot photographs) are reduced to the decimal 1 cm square taking a consistent top-left intrusion as the motif in the reduced image left from within the picture. The origins of the pictures are obscured by the reduction as the surface is peeled away to leave these recurring, abstracted, motifs from within the photograph, nullifying and multiplying the insistent noise and torrent of fleeting images, lost as they are in a nondescript expanse. The working title is Pix, as a play on . . . well you can guess, I guess.
The work seems to be moving in the right direction and plays a similar game as the earlier installation View Points that I completed last year (see my website portfolio), but here it centres on a sense of lost or dismay rather than the familiar expectations of encounter afforded by viewing points in the landscape as before. The viewer here has to scrutinise in a vain attempt to work out what is being depicted. It seems at the moment that the piece must be considerably larger to impact on the viewer significantly.
