Image Archeology/Anthropology

An array of visual qualities unique to the medium of printmaking provide a palette with which to mine a visual image landscape that has evolved over six centuries. Within the history of the printing matrix as a place(s), a technology, and a source of visual output through which to filter/distill/expand image ideas, I explore the way images resonate, dislocated from their sources in new contexts. I enjoy using the subtle transparent layers of stone or plate lithography, new possibilities of the virtual matrix, rich texture intaglio or primal mark making carved in wood to bind together or trans-locate the images .

Within a North American context it seems that since 9-11 our perception of the world has shifted from one of secure trust toward philosophical unrest, that we have been jarred into the reality of an unstable political, environmental, and ideological world that we helped create. This condition is partly the result of our inability to trust but reliance upon the seemingly abstract complexity of an ocean of information that we are bombarded with daily through news media sources. As it adds up, the effect is numbing, creates individual and collective amnesia, attention deficit, anxiety or insecurity, and moves us to reflect on our development. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggested in his 2003 work “Passwords” that this confused state of disconnection forces society to look to history to ground us and locate meaning. Probing history, both past and recent through printed images forms the basis of the ideas I explore through printmaking. Often, I use historical fragments, or texts as starting points to explore a range of ideas suggested by their contents. Recently an antique family ledger/scrapbook has provided image fragment combinations that have led to integrating imagery found through present information technologies. By building the virtual and collapsing the book object so that both arrive at the surface of the paper the unique nature of each becomes fused within the printing matrix, a possibility unique to the historical technologies of printing.This most recent series The “Ledge_ ” Suite, the compiled image fragments glued into a ledger of varying types by my ancestors between 1895 and 1950 suggested the kinds of information I would add from new media sources such as the internet in the present. Many of the additions involve elemental forces , cloud formations, water, rock, and grass and the book a decaying object itself seemed to be a symbol of a declining capitalist landscape.

I hope that the work is both a residue of my collective experience and an image landscape open to a multitude of individual readings, a rhizome with a visual structure and layers of meaning provided for the viewer to explore. It seems more now than ever that our modes of experience and belief systems are intertwined, that all fields of inquiry are in question, that the virtual is a another reality.

Mark Bovey 2008