I had the pleasure of once again being commissioned by Tim Beyer, the artistic director of No Exit New Music Ensemble, to create not only a new set of portraits of the ensemble, but also a series of original unique cameraless photograms for their year-long (2023-2024) concert series on surrealism. Much of my work has been inspired by the surrealist movement, influenced by the ideas of automatism, free association, the subconscious, as well as some of the techniques and mediums favored by those artists, most notably my use of camera-less photography, popularly known as “photograms”.
The first portion of the project was creating a set of unique, stylized portraits drawing on the influence of early surrealist photographers, utilizing techniques such as solarization and double exposures. All of the images are completely analog, shot and printed on film. No digital effects were utilized, all of the effects were created in the darkroom and printed on traditional black & white photo paper.
The second part of the project was a series of commissioned original pieces for different parts of the year-long program, with works specifically related to themes in the musical program entitled: Games, Unconscious, Piano Dada, and Breaking The World. The works consist of new, original unique silver gelatin photograms, again inspired in part by the work of early surrealists who favored the medium of cameraless photography, and more directly by the prompts of the different musical themes in the Surreality musical series. These pieces are featured in the corresponding print programs for each of those concerts. The programs themselves are works of art; printed with two sides that can be flipped, one side with the concert information, and the other side filled with commissioned and republished images, stories, and poems related to the surrealist themes of the program.
A related exhibition takes place at Heights Art from March 15th to May 12th called IRRATIONAL OBJECTS, featuring three of my commissioned pieces from the series.
From No Exit’s site: ”Our 15th season, which we’re dubbing Surreality, is our most ambitious yet. No Exit’s 2023-2024 season will encompass a wide variety of artistic mediums to present an immersive multidisciplinary exploration of Surrealism as expressed in music, art, film, poetry, literature and performance art. We hope that you will join us in taking the leap into the irrational, illogical, inexplicable, strange and utterly fantastical world of Surreality!”
