Sunday, October 31, 2010

Risa Morales presents Idris Khan VS Pep Ventosa (Part II)

This time I'm going to look at the work of Spanish ex patriot, Pep Ventosa.  His works are very similar to Kahn's in that he layers images to create new images with modified meanings.  When you look at them, the most obvious initial difference is that Ventosa uses bright and vivid colors.





Like Kahn, Ventosa uses imagery that was originally recognizable and famous in it's own right, but in Ventosa's case, he chooses objects like landmarks and carousels.  He also takes the original images himself rather than appropriating someone else's images. (this one is the niftiest looking one of his, in my opinion)

So their concepts are slightly different, but the outcome?  It's almost the same.  Another name that came up in my search was Jason Salavon.  He did composite images of playboy centerfolds(by decade), homes for sale, and blowjobs, to name a few.

So where do they go from here?  The initial idea was cool, take a bunch of images and layer them, then BAM! you get this amorphous-yet-still-identifiable resultant image.  Once you've done that a few times, and the bandwagon is headed down the road, how, as artists, will they proceed?  At first I thought the images were really interesting, but after doing the research for these posts, I'm already bored by the images resulting from these concepts.  Perhaps that's a judgement on my attention-span, but after a while, the "gimmick" of layering becomes exhausted unless a new perspective can be given to it. 

When something has "been done", then what do you do?  I think it's a question that we, as emerging photographers, have to ask ourselves constantly... and the answer very rarely seems to be very clear.

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