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WHAT IS PHOTOMORPHOSIS?

 

Don't let the dark, overly serious aspect of these images throw you off balance, or annoy you. It was never my intention to portray any sort of sardonic brilliance or mysterious alchemical significance known only to initiates. I did not begin this work with any artistic ambitions or aesthetic concerns, nor did I intend to mystify by being overly and irritatingly inexplicable...

In truth, I neither had nor have now any intentions, or aspirations what so ever. The discovery of photomorphosis, of my method was an accident, pure and simple. I was using the photocopier to reproduce some article about Yves Tanguy in a magazine and accidently moved the pages while the machine was copying. The resulting sheet of paper contained, if I recall, what looked like Tanguy imagery blown up, a strange image that visually was a mixture of blurred ghostly patterns and sharp jagged edges of something very strange stopped suddenly in motion. This certainly fascinated me and I simply decided to explore it.

I cannot convey the absolute joy and sense of playful exploration that came from the discovery of photomorphosis. I started moving other things on the copy machine; whatever illustrations I could get my hands on. I was so carried away with this activity, and the spontaneous generation of such strange imagery, that I had amassed almost 400 pages and had no idea what to do with it all. I just looked at them, marvelling at the shapes that seem to have been conjured out of nowhere... and how reality could be altered simply by moving it around a little.

Several months later, while looking at a book of collages by Max Ernst, it suddenly dawned on me to start cutting out the most interesting parts and collage them together. Certainly, these parts didn't look like anything natural, nor did the ground on which I placed them resemble any place I had seen before...

There may have been one "intention" over all, and that was not to use anything recognizable, that resembled something else, when cutting out these 'parts'. I enjoyed only the most unknown, never-before-seen things. The more unknown, the easier these things fell into place.

The humor in this work turned out to be the recognition of recognizable things that had escaped my notice when placing them into the work, only to be seen later as part of a face, for instance, or a group of people in the dark background. It was annoying, yet extremely humorous.

 

The subversion of a machine specifically designed to copy static images and documents, and turning it into a device for the incitement and capture of movement... into a recorder of unconscious activity and desire: this is also very humorous, and contrary as well.

This reversal acts as an antithesis, balancing with the thesis of the original intention (the static reproduction of things as they are), and providing a 'movement' or intervention of things as they could be... as one desires them to be. This dialectic is the central motif, or prime motive that personifies my work... the balancing act, between this and that, here and there; between the real and the imaginary. This is the essense of photomorphosis, as a synthesis of the two.

The Dream Period is what I have called the early explorations, all of the works leading up to the first series. Very psychological, obsessive and magical, these early works uncovered the place and personnages, the hybrid beings, and the world of photomorphosis.

Random Acts of Desire was the first series, and was essentially the tentative Great Work, which I attempted for various reasons, among them the possibility of eminent death (which later turned out to be a false assumption), and perhaps a desire for organization and completion.

Luminous Vessels was the companion to Random Acts of Desire. It was the feminine component or compliment, the sister, the lover, in an alchemical sense, the soror mystica of the later.

Splendor Solis was the last series and the final phase of Photomorphosis. Begun in 1993 and finished in January of 2000, this series of 22 works was not merely a culmination of everything I had done since 1973, but an attempt to go beyond that personal history. I began the series as an exploration of the unfettered imagination, attempting to delve as deeply as possible into the source out of which evolved magic, sorcery and the occult, shamanism, alchemy and surrealism...

This last series turned out to be a summation of the past, and an ending, because I had grown weary of my method, and abandoned the copy machine, replacing the tiny granules of black toner with the even smaller pixels of the computer.

The Secret Art of Photomorphosis was written as an exploration of the method of Photomorphosis, and a final summation... the closing of the work.

 

 

 

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