response (box set)
a collaboration with printmaker Jillian Ross
at the David Krut Print Workshop, Johannesburg

From the included digital print and artist statement:

Compressionism, an affectionately titled and ongoing body of work, is a “digital performance and analog archive.” I literally compress bodies, spaces and objects by traversing their surfaces with an image scanner, tracing varying 3-dimensional paths. These performative prints are produced with a custom-made scanner appendage and battery pack: I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies. The resultant, paper-sized, digital images are then stretched, cropped and colored by hand.

Compressionism is an artful performance that simultaneously occurs in both the actual and virtual space, and then uses a computer for further call and response. Each performed action produces a subsequent digital image that I then re-work and mediate through my own eye’s interpretation, and publish as editioned, photographic prints.

Wanting to continue with the iterative performance of passing through various media in such a way, I approached Jillian Ross at the David Krut Print Workshop, Johannesburg, proposing hand-made details from my Compressionist images be re-produced through other, more traditional, processes.

What began as tests, with simple transfers from digital images to polyester plates, grew into a year-long creative project, where we both pushed the boundaries of the techniques and technologies known to us, whilst re-imagining and re-working their more commonly used forms.

Our experimental work, which is now bound to be a long-term collaboration, has utilized techniques such as etching, engraving, monotype, chine collé, polyester plate lithography, aquatint, carborundum and more. This box set is a snapshot of some of the elegant work in our series thus far.