A shy poem

Ray Johnson

In this series of works in progress, I examine the question of personal identity in the age of digital information. The series shows a search for biographical traces in self-portraits with sewn-in original documents, beginning with my birth certificate and continuing on to the SIM cards that are in everyday use and in which my Self is saved in digital format. The conclusion to this series will be a collage including my death certificate, to be put together by one of my surviving family members.

'Text'

'Summer School 2009'

The format of Broomberg and Chanarin’s illustrated Holy Bible mimics both the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version. By allowing elements of the original text to guide their image selection, the artists explore themes of authorship, and the unspoken criteria used to determine acceptable evidence of conflict.

'Thinking Of You'

Burroughs’s complex and provocative uses of the image challenge critical and theoretical orthodoxies. His works in writing, visual arts, cut-up and collage, painting, assemblage, photography, and in sonic arts, constantly return in multiple ways to a detailed and politically urgent enquiry into the nature and effects of the image, the word-as-image, and beyond.

(1967)

(1924–1927)

The Pop Faces.

'Float II'

In essence, Weisbecker's art consist of depicting elements of our daily life untouched by the sometime devastating effects of fashion's changing mood. These range from tools to appliances, from industrial buildings to public housing and, in the present case, greenhouses. Greenhouses were created for the purpose of preserving an inner world from the outside world. they haven't changed much over time. Their purpose created their form. There lies their eternal beauty. It is this beauty that Weisbecker invites us to share with him through his Greenhouses study book.

'Camberwell'

The destruction is generative, yielding works that are at once haunting apparitions, censored documents, performative, material traces.

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images.

2002

Elad Lassry (Israeli, born 1977) defines his practice as consumed with “pictures”—generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives. Lassry studied film at the California Institute of the Arts then earned an MFA from the University of Southern California. Tapping the visual culture of still and motion pictures, he engages traditions of story-building with images and the ghosts of history that persist in images long after they have been lifted out of their original contexts. “I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories and the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph,” he has said. Lassry challenges the means by which a work is structured visually. His vibrant pictures—still life compositions, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities—never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread and are displayed in frames that derive their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs. In their pop-culture subject matter, Lassry’s works mimic commercial photography. Yet the shots that may at first seem the most direct are complicated by double exposures, an occasional blur, or the superimposition of multiple negatives. Lassry often displays his photographs beside 16mm film projections.