Senior Thesis
This piece is the culmination of my multi-panel digital montage work. The composition is inspired by flemish altar piece painting where a narative is created from panel to panel. The altar pieces were symmetrical because they were often mounted in a cabinet which was folded away after mass was complete, hence the work's symmetrical composition.
As for the story being told… I don't have the foggiest idea. I was influenced by the impressionistic narratives found in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland as well as Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and wanted to feel out the composition rather than shoot around a predetermined story. Interpreting the narrative is up to the viewer. It seems like it's a violent one, a theme I would return to in VS; the top and bottom panels were created with appropriated internet pornography, laying the foundation for NSFW.
Wall mounted photo installation. 21' x 12' The size varies depending on how it's hung. For scale, the vertical strips on the ends are four feet tall. The panel format was dictated by the maximum print area of the Epson 2000p printer I used to create it.
Wall mounted photo installation. 21' x 12' The size varies depending on how it's hung. For scale, the vertical strips on the ends are four feet tall. The panel format was dictated by the maximum print area of the Epson 2000p printer I used to create it.
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Multi-panel Digital Montages
These are the highlights from the series of photoshop pieces that lead to my senior thesis. They are the first digital images I made that I consider to be important as they incorporate elements from Tape and Scratches, and many of the lighting and panel transitions would go on to inform NSFW.
One aspect of this series that interests me is how rooted in the materials it is, despite being digital. They were produced at the turn of the millennium, before digital imaging had supplanted chemical photography. I remember obsessing about getting the size and sharpness of the film grain to match from mask to background, something you don't have to worry about today. Prints were made on an Epson 2000p, the limitations of which determined their final format. The Mac OS9 drivers limited it to 13"x44" so I composed all of these images to conform to that limitation. This carried over to NSFW. The vertical white lines on early NSFW pieces originally denoted divisions between prints, however once large format printing became common and cheap they revised into compositional elements.