Visually, the Memento Mori series pulls from autobiography, anthropology, LA lowbrow, early Sienese painting. Scales slip, perspectives warp, time folds in on itself. The process is just as hybrid, as drawings become rough models; wax and clay figures are built, scanned, broken down, rebuilt; digital simulations generate smoke, dust, breath. Each diorama takes about 6 to 8 months to develop. The final images are printed using now-obsolete LightJet technology on Duratrans film, a final flowering of analogue tangled up with digital construction. This photomontage shows just a few of the elements of the process.
Metempsychosis
2021. Lenticular 3D lightjet print on lightbox. 105 x 105 x 5 cm.
DISCLAIMER: This series of works was designed so as to be impossible to photograph, in reaction to the tyranny of Instagram. Standing in front of one, with your two eyes, you look into a fully three-dimensional scene, like one of those museum dioramas. Every element has been sculpted, and you can look around and discover new details, the perspective changing as you move your head. But photograph it, and the space collapses. So here I am, hoist by my own petard!
The series is called Memento Mori, densely layered narrative tableaux that investigate the philosophical and emotional dimensions of death, variously seen as erasure, exile, annihilation, transformation, forgetting; each one based on the loss of a significant person in my life.
Memento Mori – process
Metempsychosis