Imagery, here, in this current body of work is treated as a form of language. Drawn from disparate sources; cartoons, films, photography, historical painting, and other corners of our shared forum of visual culture, snipped and fragmented, modified and transformed, operating through association and context as it travels outwards from its original referentiality. Each image functions as a signifier, one with a specific origin, but one that transforms its position, shaped through abstraction, distortion, and repetition. This deliberate loss of specificity mirrors the experience of contemporary image consumption, where excess and overexposure produce a condition of visual fatigue.
These snippets of visual culture, in their found form, reflect certain flattened hierarchies, but also, exist as a poignant reminder of the accelerated circulation of images across platforms and time. In the choice to pick specific images and focus on these particular visual moments this appropriated imagery is transformed. Through their subjugation to layered digital manipulations and physical treatments they become something new, like letters rearranged to create new words and sentences. The processes of degradation, compression, and translation echo the ways images are continually uploaded, shared, and recontextualized, although here, forcefully given new meaning through intentionality and decision.
Through strategies of abstraction and mutation, the source images are severed from their initial conditions of production and reception, enabling the emergence of new relational possibilities. The work engages with appropriation as both method and critical position, foregrounding the instability of authorship, originality, and image circulation within contemporary visual culture.
From the baseline selection process the cropped and formatted images are digitally altered, fed through a variety of computerized programs, and subsequently printed and transferred using a range of print-based techniques onto physical substrates where further intervention extends the image’s transformation. This movement between screen-based and material processing slows the image down, interrupting its seamless circulation reintroducing friction. The resulting works exist as residues of visual excess—objects that register both the saturation of contemporary image culture and a resistance to its total disposability.
The oscillation between digital and material processes underscores the image as a site of continual becoming, destabilizing distinctions between original and copy, screen and object, immaterial circulation and physical presence. In this way, the work positions the image as both artifact and residue of contemporary visual culture—shaped by systems of technological mediation, reproduction, and excess.