The world of imaging was very different, perhaps even primitive by today's standards, when I created Le Musée de la Femme and Le Cirque Eternel. Thirty years ago, most image making was done by hand, in the dark, using film and an array of chemical solutions, some of them fairly toxic. It was the hands-on, the pre-digital age. The mouse, the hard drive and Photoshop were still in their crude infancies. Jerry Uelsmann, a master manipulator of the photographic image, was an artist I revered.
Nine foggy Paris winters in the 1990s teaching at SPEOS influenced the work you see on exhibit here. Solitary afternoons at the Musée de L’Homme and other, lesser known museums inspired me to create images of mythological creatures in mystical environments.
I photographed dozens of natural world subjects, then assembled large, composite negatives of those images and embellished them with drawing and sgraffito. The final composite negatives were the essential component in my creative process. In the darkroom I printed sections, often at different magnifications and exposures, reassembled the printed sheets to express my ideas, and later polychromed them in daylight with photographic toners. The series All-Consuming Myths, exploring human relationships where food plays a central role (food = Love)), is another example of the technique and processes I used at the time.
To this day, much of my work features representations of the female figure in settings and on stages I create for them, usually surrounded by their own private universes. Those settings frequently take the form of a complex planetary arrangement of fanciful ephemera such as birds and insects, to flora and fauna orbiting the background, structured in the style of manuscript illuminations, visually suggesting an extension of the central figures’ intricate, emotional worlds.
*Laser images at SPEOS have been reduced from the large-scale originals for transporting purposes. They measure approximately 3’ x 4’.
https://www.mjvianocrowe.net/photographic-constructions/1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeOe6m5ryTo
Nine foggy Paris winters in the 1990s teaching at SPEOS influenced the work you see on exhibit here. Solitary afternoons at the Musée de L’Homme and other, lesser known museums inspired me to create images of mythological creatures in mystical environments.
I photographed dozens of natural world subjects, then assembled large, composite negatives of those images and embellished them with drawing and sgraffito. The final composite negatives were the essential component in my creative process. In the darkroom I printed sections, often at different magnifications and exposures, reassembled the printed sheets to express my ideas, and later polychromed them in daylight with photographic toners. The series All-Consuming Myths, exploring human relationships where food plays a central role (food = Love)), is another example of the technique and processes I used at the time.
To this day, much of my work features representations of the female figure in settings and on stages I create for them, usually surrounded by their own private universes. Those settings frequently take the form of a complex planetary arrangement of fanciful ephemera such as birds and insects, to flora and fauna orbiting the background, structured in the style of manuscript illuminations, visually suggesting an extension of the central figures’ intricate, emotional worlds.
*Laser images at SPEOS have been reduced from the large-scale originals for transporting purposes. They measure approximately 3’ x 4’.
https://www.mjvianocrowe.net/photographic-constructions/1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeOe6m5ryTo
