Killing Stills 1

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Creator
  • Robertson, Drew
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History, Studio Art
Abstract
  • Each of these started as a video still. Using Photoshop I manipulated the stills. Photoshop allows images to be in a space that blurs the boundary between painting and photography. These mediums used to be at odds with each other. Now they can be merged digitally. My intention is to make painterly abstractions that are humorous. Whether clearly funny or not, I set out to create humor by composing the images in a process inspired by the Incongruity Theory of laughter. In essence the Incongruity Theory states that due to our expectations of order in the world we are used to certain patterns in things. When those patterns are broken, we laugh. Blaise Pascal wrote "Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees." When we combine things people don't expect to see together it can create curiosity, or in the best cases laughter." In these Photoshopped works I am able to create images where the background and foreground share the same plane; where hyper-saturated colors coexist with muted ones. I can make abstract colorfield or geometric pictures that have small concrete elements that pop out of them, for example a shoe, or a silhouette of a penis, or my underwear. I am using repetition, I am literally making patterns by cloning pixels and pasting them across the surface. This repetition adds depth and a layer of abstraction, just as it does in my performances.
Date of publication
DOI
Resource type
  • Art
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Extent
  • 24" x 36"
Medium
  • Digitally composited image, laser print

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file details 2016_Robertson_15.tif 2019-05-09 Public Download