Images/video:
1. Whitetail deer in sylvan misé-en-scene at the American Museum of Natural History (digital photograph)
2. Power plant near Martins Creek, Pennsylvania (digital photograph)
7. A series of experiences related by a man who only exists on a state ID (video)
There exists a logical, if abstracted, relationship between each of the images I present in this deadpan-inspired assessment of image definition and image appropriation.
The series opens with Whitetail deer in sylvan mise-en-scène, a photograph I made at the American Museum of Natural History. A buck peers around the edge of the frame, as if to examine the viewer. In the foreground, a doe cranes her neck toward some of the plastic plant-matter that also occupies this carefully painted and manufactured reality. My image holds immobile this scene, which is—at its essence—also immobile, permanent, fixed for viewing by thousands of museum visitors.
In the next image of a Power plant near Martins Creek, Pennsylvania exists a contrast between static, man-made infrastructure and the fertile winter-waste former farmland in its immediate proximity. Vegetation grows, its significance trumped by the wooden power poles and concrete-and-steel that afford modern convenience to the region. On a different plane of viewing exists the struggle between appreciation of the scene's geometry and the seduction of the cooling towers to be read through the viewer's image repertoire (and reduced to just another photograph of cooling towers).
The third photograph of a Hula girl shower curtain embraces its relationship with the viewer's image repertoire, existing as a manufactured (in several senses of the word) representation of an iconic, touristy, knickknack experience. It forces the viewer to further explore and question the translation of a Hawaiian woman's cultural dance into a dashboard trinket and the translation of that image onto a household necessity.
In the fourth photograph of Two couples off the dance floor at a European nightclub, Brooklyn the viewer examines the physical reflection of emotion in the nuances of hand, arm, and facial gestures. An exchange of power unfolds as the women dominate the men and, in turn, the men dominate the women. The image communicates both an air of vulnerability and composure. The woman escaping the frame suggests all of these fleeting experiences which are reduced and objectified by my image.
Insert musician, enjoy is intended to suggest something of the universality of the viewing and listening experience within a context specific to some of the Brooklyn indie scene. The photograph, with its three characters each obscured by silhouette, deletion, or non-description, calls into question the identity of the performer and the audience, suggesting their interchangeability and the examination of the audience-as-subject.
Identity is directly asserted in Gregory Hill Jr's New York State Driver's License, which as an ID card found on a subway platform in Brooklyn is supposed to offer incontrovertible proof of who you are. But this beaten and battered ID appears to be fake—its holograms do not cast spectral flashes of color at each angle of view. A fake identity subverts the value of a real one.
Engrossed by the concept of a manufactured, fake, and appropriated identity, I wrote and compiled a short film to explore A series of experiences related by a man who only exists on a state ID. The film uses images appropriated from the internet, a VHS tape I found in a dumpster near Astor Place, and several feature films to create a non-sequitur, stream-of-consciousness monologue from the point of view of Gregory Hill Jr. The film uses this technique to assert new meaning for images, which at times do, and other times do not follow the narration. By articulating this balance, the audience is forced to both associate and dissociate the meaning behind the images and the aural experience of the film.
In the process of making this film, I was struck by some of the images I saw on the VHS tape—which contained seventeen Arabic-language soda advertisements from the 1980s. I made freeze frames of each of these images. I believe that the individual image can only contextualized by its audio and video timestamps. The juxtaposition of image content and the name of each diptych force the viewer to recontextualize what they see.
In Diptych of a misogynist rescue I appropriated two images from a commercial which features a James Bond-like character and a helpless woman locked to a table. The woman's nervous gaze into the other frame—which shows the same woman drinking champagne from a flute and the man drinking directly from the bottle—creates a sense of lust for indulgence and juxtaposes temporalities.
The Diptych of a lunch counter raid contrasts the blurred abstraction of a fighter-jet escaping the frame with a several teenagers crawling over a lunch counter. Each suggests warmongering, though one is part of the military industrial complex and the other is seemingly innocent. The relationship between each bellicose action creates a discernible unease.
In the final image, Diptych of a man who found Christ, a man squats against a wall, sinking to the ground, enduring the sun. In the opposing image a man stands upright, one arm extended toward the sky; he salutes God. He is situated at the apex of a two lines, which form a triangle with the bottom of the frame. The images are full of visual contrasts; one man sinks, while the other rises; one man wears blue pants and a white shirt, the other wears the opposite. Their attitudes towards life stand in contrast. Perhaps they are two different men, or perhaps the image shows before and after one man found Christ… or a cupcake.
Images/video copyright Jonno Rattman 2009. Rights reserved.
Images/video copyright Jonno Rattman 2009. Rights reserved.
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