What's New

What's New:

Over the years many artists have manipulated photography, but over the last decade I have developed a new process resulting in a unique art form. I call the results “XRAY Photograms” or "PHOTOTRANSFORMATIONS".

My creative process involves manipulation of conventional photographs using a long-established technique (“flottage”), with an uncommon medium (barium), a heavy metal sometimes used in painting and in medical xrays. This is a unique personal process, in which a medical XRAY of the manipulated photograph, with its applied barium, produces an XRAY transparency, which may be viewed in several different ways.

In each of these efforts, I am addressing what I imagine to be the “inner life” of two-dimensional space, a process involving both choice and chance, and incorporating elements of photography, painting and bas-relief sculpture, in which the viscous barium is shaped for imaging. In each of these works, my intent is that the resultant XRay transparency will become an “infrastructural” expression of the original photographic substance, as if a virtual spawn of the parent photograph.

My current work focuses upon what I consider to be two of the most “artificial” elements of contemporary American culture: Haute Couture and Professional Wrestling, both perhaps deserving of infrastructural examination. Several of my fashion-oriented works are included elsewhere on this website. The wrestling imagery includes black and white photographs of “men in motion” (falling, diving, or being thrown).

XRAY Photogram Transparencies (or opaque B-W prints of the Photograms) may be created up to 3x6 feet, as small numbered editions, either framed for wall hanging, in free standing mounts, or as lightbox presentations. In the latter format, the 14x17 inch image is set within a translucent silvered mat in a 16x20 silvered lightbox only 1/4 inch thick.

The “parent” barium paintings are unique works of the same general size (14x17”), and are often shown with their corresponding XRAY photogram(s). Curatorial advice on this practice has been divided, some suggesting that the artistic result (ie, the photogram) should be “digested” independent of the nuts and bolts of the (barium) process. The debate continues.

This work will be featured in “The Art of Film: Not Immediately Transparent” at The Lighthouse Center for the Arts, Tequesta, FL, January 2010, including free-standing, wall-hung and life size images.