artist statement
- landscape
- Technological advances in the production of the photographic medium and its manipulation reinforce our expectations of an existence where our sentimentality is embodied in mediated reality. Landscapes occupy integral and ubiquitous spaces within traditional and contemporary photography, due to the medium’s undeniable ability to mesmerize in timeless perfection a simultaneous sense of place, dislocation, and expanse. To illustrate the power of photography’s visual language and its role in staging and shaping contemporary symbolism, I create memory landscapes – a fictional world where remembering imagery in and through photography form a dual indeterminacy of both form and content. Here the frame of reference lies within the interrogation of the medium itself. Compelled by light, I pan and scan and extract segments from my previous photos, transforming them into new abstractions.
The ‘camera’ draws toward particular places within previous original works to the point that we begin to see ‘inside’ a new space hidden within the source material.
The ensuing photoscapes develop into breathtaking vistas, awe-inspiring panoramas, and majestic, untouched territories, suggesting apocalypse and utopia. What transcends are parcels of photography-sourced realities, abstractions that, in and of themselves, remind us there exists an intimacy and otherness to the world and everything on it.
Italics taken from an unpublished essay by Jeremy Glazier entitled, “The Presence of the Original: Photoscopy, Physics and the Recent Work of Robert Metzger”.
- abstract
- The production and manipulation of the photographic image reinforce our expectations of an existence where our desires are embodied in mediated reality. To illustrate the power of the photographic image and its role as a mechanism in shaping and staging contemporary symbolism, I photograph electronic waste and visual static. Similar to the repel of two magnets at odds with each other's polarity, the video camera has been turned toward the screen of a color video monitor, capturing the feedback. Stills from these raw images are digitized and saturated. The results are depictions of chaos, fabricated patterns, implied textures, depths, and the phenomenon of synaesthesia that are most often left up to the discernment of the audience, but simultaneously seem intent on establishing associations with more representational imagery.
- figurative
- Our lives are programmed vignettes of a paralyzed culture. Individuality is distilled into standardized, interchangeable, disposable working parts. Organic living emulate, to idolatrous proportions the merchandising produced by designer media…bringing everybody online for total global integration.
Technological advances in the production of the photographic image and its manipulation reinforce our expectations of an existence where our needs are embodied in mediated reality. The photographic images presented here have been composed consisting of my original color and black and white negatives with video stills. They are deliberately rendered with a strong sense of pixelization to underscore the technological advances happening within the photographic medium and to compliment the artificiality of much of our existence. These images illustrate the frailties that make us human through the spiritual expression of light.
