vis-à-vis

While I was working on Rubb-O-grams it wasn't a big stretch to start placing other objects on the overhead projector. Even though I wanted to move away from vintage material I somehow gravitated towards these vintage flash bulbs. The bulbs were chosen for their light modulating characteristics as well as their historical significance to the medium. They were, of course, used to illuminate the photographer’s subjects for the camera.

One of the things I have been thinking about is the different forms an image can exist in.  An image can exist as a print, a negative, a file, appear in a magazine, in a book, on a monitor, you can hold it in your hands, etc and still it is essentially the same image.

Does an image need to take form to be classified as a photograph? Can an image exist as just light? Where does a projected image reside? In this installation I am projecting an image of vintage flash bulbs and providing the viewer with hand held screens. To view the image you must interact with it. I call this piece vis-à-vis; face to face. The viewer is face to face with the lens and light of the overhead projector. The viewer must shift their relationship with the light and hold a screen to find the point where the image becomes visible.

Abstraction can be about what isn’t present; it’s an abstraction of something else. Here I am questioning representation itself, which is always about what’s absent, what is not there.

I also made still photographs of the projected images. They stand as an alternative representation. The piece as a whole turns your attention away from the image and focuses on the mode of production.

And of course I could not stop myself from making even more fractured formal abstract compositions of these. Yet another manifestation.