It is a simple thing, but I really enjoy putting two images beside each other and seeing what happens. It reminds my of a Sesame Street bit, with photos arrayed in a grid, and a song playing over it all, “One of these things is not like the others, some of these things are kinda the same…” When we see two images purposely arranged side by side we look for what is similar and what is different. When I started this series, Jewels, I just wanted to put two images together that shared the trait of having some very vivid particular color contrasting with its background. It was only by chance that the “natural vs. human” slipped in, or maybe it was subconscious and not by chance. In another post I will ramble on about how purpose and chance enter into my process, I’ve got to think some more about it…
Eric Hope writes in a review in East City Art: “Artist and photographer Leda Black proved big ideas come in small packages. While her larger images of biomorphic forms beckoned viewers from afar, her tiny diptychs (just a few inches across) hooked the viewer’s attention up close. These small works function both as delightful studies of color and as more wry observations on the ways in which the natural and man-made worlds coalesce.”
These are wee diptychs with each image 4 inches square mounted on a 1.25 inch deep cradled board. The board’s edges are painted in a shade of the named hue and a gloss varnish is brushed over the colored object in the photo. “Jewel” refers to the vivid hue and to the minuteness of the image.
I’m doing some catch-up in this and the previous post. I have had a lot of practice talking about my work this past year and a half since opening a public studio on the Arts Walk.
Pseudomorph, noun: 1. an irregular or unclassifiable form.
For the Pseudomorphs my goal was to create something outside of categories. This was interesting to me as an exercise in critical thinking and I thought it useful to prompt viewers to pay attention to how their minds work. I have an abiding interest in exploring what is really real, and it is an essential step in this exploration to look at how our minds and cultures impose labels and boundaries around things. We may not be able to experience things outside of these boundaries, but at least we can pay attention to how they work and why they’re there. I used the most basic “Twenty Questions”-like categories: Animal; Plant; Manufactured. I chose to photograph objects that shared some kind of visual characteristic, something I call a visual rhyme. For example, in “Pseudomorphs: Specimen 1” I used objects that had small enclosed blank spaces: horse bridle hardware; bug-bitten leaf; Monarch butterfly wing. Then I created a completely new object by grafting these together using computer software (Photoshop). I realized, though, that once I made more than one, and once I titled the series, then I had in reality created a new category of thing, not a thing outside of categories. The human mind—there it goes again! I love to play with how our minds jump to organization and meaning every time. Verbal nonsense is a center of gravity for me because I love to feel this bending-toward-meaning-but-not-quite-getting-there.
The best thing about having a studio that is often open to the public is I get to see how all kinds of people react to my work without having to go through a lot of exhibition rigmarole. And I could see people reacting to the riddle nature of these pieces, so I can see I am communicating what I set out to do.
The Pseudomorphs and the Celestial Bodies are built with the same parameters. The Celestials often incorporate more than three objects, but the three categories of plant, animal, manufactured all need to be represented. When I was collecting objects to make into Pseudomorphs I had many that were either circular or radially organized. These didn’t lend themselves to the visual grafting technique and so when I made my first image with round things I used layering techniques instead. There are a lot of complex and beautiful ways to layer things in Photoshop. But the resulting image, now titled “Celestial Bodies: Aldebaran,” seemed to be too different from the other Pseudomorphs, so I set it aside. Before I printed editions or framed any of these I would show proofs to visitors and I had one visitor who really responded to Aldebaran. So I decided to keep riffing on round. Many of the source images I use are scans I’ve made of actual objects. If I leave the scanner lid open to accommodate thicker objects then the light from the scanner falls off into space and in the resulting scan the object appears to be emerging from blackness. This blackness reminded me of the emptiness of space, and since many planets are uncannily spherical, my round layered things appeared to be celestial bodies. I knew I wanted to do a series of riffs on round—maybe I always think in series because I started out making books—and I decided to do 26 named for each letter of the alphabet, named after real extraterrestrial places. I have sometimes chosen colors based on their real namesakes, and if the object is a double star I sometimes make a double-round riff (like for Hadar). Whenever I have to choose an arbitrary number I try to make 26 work because I love the alphabet so much.
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