Mixed Media Art | Return to Gallery
ShareThisDowntown with Daffodils
In this photographic montage, coloured shapes are overlaid recalling the hand-pulled process of lithography. Photographic elements are layered with consideration to their formal qualities to create the composition. By allowing the images to merge one into the other, the multisensory impact of walking down a busy city street is evoked. Fragments of traffic noise and voices overlay the passing texture of buildings, reflections, urban gardens and window displays that make up this urbanscape. The memory is not of one concrete moment but of a continuum of moments.
Photomontage as an artistic practice has been in use for well over a hundred years. Dada artists, active in the early part of the twentieth century, commented on the changing nature of their culture in photomontage compositions. Consider this quote from Patrizia di Bello in the Photography Encyclopaedia: "For Dada artists, photomontage embodied an expanded vision, collapsing many viewpoints and replacing the image of a continuous life glimpsed through a window frame—the heritage of the fine arts since the Renaissance—with a discontinuous, fast-paced, multifaceted image." Click here for a brief description and history of photomontage.