SCREENS 1 1986-1993

These photographs are addressing issues of cultural longing, the images having their origins in the natural world but are removed from nature, firstly through the artifice of over-cultivation and grooming inherent in the imagery- golf courses, night-lit landscapes, gardens, artificial waterfalls, bonsai trees-and further through the media packaging of beauty as presented in magazines and theme calendars. By re-photographing these subjects from the glut of existing images in our culture, the photographs become reflective of that culture, simultaneously fulfilling a contrived yearning for beauty while denying the direct experience of it. The issue of adapting imagery from pre-existing sources is not one of appropriation of authorship, but of utilizing popular imagery as metaphor for a condition of cultural desire- images of sushi become icons for the popularization of the exotic. The source images are painted over to enhance and exaggerate or repress areas, and then re-photographed through a dense screen, transforming the imagery into a "crystalline composite of color". The familiar becomes elusive in the struggle to regain a recollected orientation to what is now generalized in a molecular surface, the screen acting as a "leveler of language".

- 1987

ELLEN BROOKS

ELLEN BROOKS