Scurograph: Luminous photograms and drawings
Massillon Museum-Studio M
June 11-July 27, 2022
Evocative of watery depths, imaginary galaxies, and mysterious maps, these luminous images create an immersive dimension with their own logic and rules of scale and space. As in dreams, my imagery seems familiar but weird; letters that don’t exist, math that doesn’t add up, and mutated forms floating in dark space. Like blueprints (which were in fact an early use of the cyanotype process), these images resemble intricate, mechanical drawings. But instead of buildings or machines, I’m laying out the plans for imaginary locations and strange mechanisms.
These artworks are rooted in drawing, starting out as small sketches where I develop my concepts, motifs, and patterns. For the photograms, I use stencils, miscellaneous bric-a-brac, and hand-drawn “negatives” to serve as an analog to the lines and marks of the original drawings. Those bits and pieces are then laid out on coated, sensitized paper to create glowing reversed shadows and lines. In some of the artworks, I integrate drawing directly onto the paper before it is sensitized, creating an extra layer of detail, with the ink acting both as a chemical resist and as literal marks. Since this is a reversal process, one must visualize how solid objects leave white shadows, translucent objects leave shades of color, and negative space takes on the deep cyan once the image is exposed and washed. The large drawings bring the process full circle, drawing inspiration from the photograms, recreating those patterns again with ink on paper.
