Published selection of captioned imagery for “Made You Look”, June 2022, Plastikcomb Magazine issue #4 (sold out)
01
Metaphysical portrait. Framed by strips of black. Yellow square. Below it, window to a room. Green and white walls, power tool plugged into unidentifiable industrial object at right. Further to the right, something soft, supple, gray. One floor down, red sleeve or beanie. Down another floor, dull blue then, hands, forearm, fingers, a red robe, folds of skin, lower half of someone’s midriff. Half a belly button. Bottommost segment, paler blue, black dot. Left, strip of gray, top left, angled cut.
02
Cow. Black and white portrait, torn page from a book. “From” and “ago”, separately cut and pasted piece of paper in-between, same color as margins and background. At lower left corner, coarse and discolored layering. Chair base and casters for eyes and nose.
03
A woman. Red, pearl necklace, gold bracelet, cropped hands, not quite clasped. Black and white photo of open field covers hair and face, white border at left. Atop open field, somber, undulating sky blue silhouette. Number 70, small, printed. Below, turned 90° counterclockwise, the other, not-quite-half of open field. Roughly hewn shape at lower left on which is printed a non-standard, black-lined frame. Within, two cartoonish arrows, one points northeast, the other west. Red bar becomes woman’s necklace becomes the bar, separates top half of open field from bottom half. To right of latter half, an adjoining, wider strip of red. Upon it, two severely cropped white stubs, half circles echoing gleam of woman’s bracelet, light illuminating her wrist and fingers too.
04
Study. A mere incident of variously cut elements. Everything on newsprint, right edge is gnawed. Blue-gray image (is that sky?), white border at right and bottom intact. Gradient of darkening or lightening blue, cut shape like a spearhead. Within, a specimen the color and texture of skin. At right and above blue-gray sky, cropped face. Black and white photo, far left side. Top and bottom right, dark shapes. Unfinished.
05
Pair of columns. From top left, newsprint gray to ochre, leaden blue, lightening maroon settles on equivalent of average. Spliced, changes to pale green. Pale green turns to gray green then, color of sand. Brown, a hiccup then, sand afresh then, back to brown. Darkening, turns to aqueous green. Cut to deep purple, descending, reprise: aqueous green to yellow green. Going down, yellow orange becomes orange then, a color like almost-magenta-red, then olive green. Darkening, darkening toward fringe.
06
Cabinet of curiosities. Top left, a drastically trimmed couch (chair? lazy boy?), side tray visible. Top right, two-toned, shaped like a halberd. Center, colossal, obsidian, another shape. Gaping maw. At left, something small, yellow orange. In-between shapes, keynotes.
07
Shapes. Cut and pasted images, culverts for emergent negative shapes, pith. Right, black and white, man in a suit, hem where left hand should be. Top left, roadway capped by wire twist or cropped fabric – undulating surface, mesmeric.
08
Condensed. Off-white against red background, chiseled, headline size L set sideways, made even longer by means of an equivocally placed black olive-backed letterform. Resembles handlebar grip or bat handle. Lower left, below razor-sharp serif, red, fiercely cropped subordinate L outlined black. À la machinist square, grouped Ls partially frame a sequence of Os. Green and monumental, leftmost O is akin to a portal out of – or into which – an adjacent, acutely contrasted black O enters or exits. Next, duo of shadowed Os: one ivory-colored, geometric over orange and bonded to it, an orange, super elliptical dot-screened sky-blue O. Offsetting the discordant overlap of Os, the color orange morphing from background to letterform, letterform to background. The tension between off-kilter olive, ivory, yellow, sky-blue, and orange edges highlight the altogether fluid and gawky company of shapes. Right, a compositional fault line inhabited by condensed, bright-yellow V over blue gray. Latter overlapped by orange, ivory-backed, polygonal cutout. Inside cutout, smaller, stockier V flaunts a block serif. At right, a sliver of orange running cockeyed of cutout’s right edge. In yellow, condensed E and, at right, another E outlined green. To the far right, stacked red Es and, at lower right, hooplike, black interior and exterior flourishes.