Collaging like Painting with clouds...
Satellite Collections
digital prints
2009-2011
You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there's no strings holding it up, and it's moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.
-Eugene Cernan, an astronaut on the Apollo 17, on seeing the Earth from space
In all of these prints, I collect things that I've cut out from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landfills, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here.
The alienation provided by the satellite perspective reveals the things we take for granted to be strange, even absurd. Banal structures and locations can appear fantastical and newly intricate. Directing curiosity toward our own inimitably human landscape, we may find that those things that are most recognizably human (a tangle of carefully engineered water slides, for example) are also the most bizarre, the most unlikely, the most fragile.
http://news.gestalten.com/motion/john-stezaker
In an image-saturated world, British collage artist John Stezaker rather creates more with less. Cutting up yesterday photographs, subtracting pieces, and juxtaposing faces, he transforms forgotten photographs and postcards into symbolic portraiture of modernism. Stezaker’s artistic interests in examining hidden relations between images have bestowed international success and recognition upon him and his collage art. Gestalten.tv had a precious opportunity to speak with the artist at his exhibition in Berlin’s Capitain Petzel Gallery. Featured in the celebrated group exhibition The Age of Collage, his topical work is now on display at Gestalten Space in Berlin until January 12, 2014. The accompanying book The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art takes an insightful behind-the-scenes look at those working with this interdisciplinary and cross-media approach.
Cassandra C. Jones ( http://www.cassandrac.net ) work uses "found photography" from search engines to explore how we relate to images online.