Aperture: Given your interest in spirituality and universality, do you have any religious beliefs or belief in God?
I had an interesting experience the other day. Bill Hunt and I were talking about the spiritual aspects of blue. He asked me if I believed in God and when I hesitated, he said, “You believe in the subconscious.” It occurred to me that belief in the subconscious might be another way of saying God is within you. I had never thought of that before. I guess I’m still learning.
I came across this photographer's work on a link (see research tab) when googling abstract photography.
The strong colours and blurred images are themes that are repeated in my work.
Obscuring, blurring and layering, these are aspects of mine and other peoples work that I'm intrigued by.
The figures in Bill Armstrongs work have a figurative element to them, they are recognisable as people. The blurred images set up a distance and barrier between the photographer/viewer and the subject. This is distance is a topic that I'm interested in, and engagement of the viewer is something I have been researching as part of my art theory essay on immersive installations and Olafur Eliassons' work.
The ambiguity and indistinct images add an abstract quality to the work. There is intrigue as to how these images are created, to me it adds a mystery to what could otherwise be a very technically executed sharp portrait image. I like reportage photography and portraiture, especially Sally Mann's work, but feel that Bill Armstrongs images have more of a fine art slant that I can relate to. See below for one of my photos that is a favourite image, It's a white van behind nasty 80s style PVC patterned window.
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| image by cloudstomper |
the infinity series
The Infinity series is an extensive body of work that I have been photographing since 1997. It includes a wide range of portfolios, from figurative to abstract, that are made using my unique process of photographing found images extremely out of focus with the camera’s focusing ring set at infinity.
My unique process of appropriating images and subjecting them to a series of manipulations—photocopying, cutting, painting, re-photographing—transforms the originals and gives them a new meaning in a new context. Extreme blurring makes the edges within the collages disappear, so the photographs appear to be seamless, integrated images. This sleight of hand allows me to conjure a mysterious tromp l'oeil world that hovers between the real and the fantastic. It is a world just beyond our grasp, where place may be suggested, but is never defined, and where the identity of the amorphous figures remains in question. It is a world that might exist in memory, in dreams, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe yet unvisited.
The nature of visual perception intrigues me: how the eye continually tries to resolve these images, but is unable to do so, and how that is unsettling. And I am drawn to the idea that we can believe something is real, while at the same time knowing it is illusory; that the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed, is what frees us to respond emotionally.
At the same time, the subject of these collages is color. Extreme de-focusing enables me to blend and distill hues, creating rhapsodies of color that are meditative pieces—glimpses into a space of pure color, beyond our focus, beyond our ken.
Gallery representation:
Hackelbury (alongside photographer Gary Fabian Miller)
http://www.aperture.org/blog/interview-with-bill-armstrong/
http://www.aperture.org/blog/interview-with-bill-armstrong/
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