Christian Conrad

“Quattro FORmaggio"

February 3-February 25 2012
John F. Lott Gallery

Collage Statement

Quattro Formaggio: A fine blending of cultural collage sure to satiate any appetite. When I create a collage series, I look for two distinct cultural elements to intertwine. My materials come from my study of artistic and cultural representations found in multi-print sources. I am interested in deriving parallels from these highly reproduced sources. My aim is to show connections in material that extend beyond ideas limited by physical geography and temporal placement. I have four bodies of collage work on display: Fortune Cookies- Magazine advertisements from the 1950s blended with Chinese woodblock prints from before 1800. Gallant Feats- A Boy Scout manual meets alchemy prints from Europe’s past. The Evolution of Angels- A book on evolution from the 1940s dressed up with historic paper dolls, celebrating the tradition of human/animal combinations in art. Cowboys and India- Explore the old West as seen through classic cowboy images placed within the exotic landscape of India.

Video Statement

Memory Passages is a series of video collage work that I created around a group of twenty-minute audio recordings I captured over a one-year period. Divided into a two ten minute video, each week represents a week’s worth of audio recordings put to the background of all the previous weeks. In a similar fashion, each video begin with the previous weeks as a starting point of my creative process. Through this method of layering both sound and image, each video contains new events in relation to the previous moments already experienced, mirroring the processes of life and how new events are measured against our memories of previous times. On display are sixteen weeks of videos displayed over four screens, each having four weeks of content.

Links
conradmerz.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAYQYrnnubI&feature=g-upl&context=G28af45eAUAAAAAAALAA