Jeff Prentice: Diamond Age
Artist(s):
Title:
- Diamond Age
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2005
Medium:
- Digital print
Size:
- 15 inches x 6 0 inches
Category:
Artist Statement:
My prints are constructs of territories and borders, catalogs, and crowds. They became more personal when I returned to Southern California, where already expensive real estate increases in value daily, traffic is congested, neighborhoods are bursting at the seams, and different cultures and lifestyles are the rule and not the exception. I think of the print area as real estate. The objects and individuals
become crowds, populations, neighborhoods, and contained worlds. I view them as cultural portraits and visually percussive formal arrangements.
They are organized as both vistas and flatland, panoramas and page spreads, and consist of thousands of digital photographs, primarily of people, taken in specific locations. Some elements are obtained through web searches and scans.The process involves shooting over 200 photographs a day for several weeks in various locations. As I cut and paste the images together, I’m balancing digital and painterly aesthetics, allowing aliased rips and rough edges to be the drip and gesture of paint The obsessive activity of cutting, pasting, reducing, and combining hundreds or thousands of images together is done without a formla and permits radical redirections and changes in form, open to unexpected developments. My background as a painter influences the way I work digitally. In my studio projects, it can be the unintentional mark, the under-painting. or a subtractive process that resolves the image. Digital technology and installation are natural evolutionary steps, embracing accident, chance, and coincidence. Elements are easily rearranged, stacked. erased, enlarged, suspended, and ordered.
