ScholarWorks

Title

A Paler Shade of Blue

Creator

Braxton Charles Duncan, Boise State UniversityFollow

Creation Date

2016

Preview

Medium

monotype printing on paper

Description

Dimensions: 17.5 x 17.5 inches

Artist Statement

Man Made Reality

This final show of work is about evaluating and deriving symbolic meaning from the everyday landscape. Starting out, I look for imagery where the built environment shows signs of time. For photographing places, I look for odd or dated colors, subtleties in light and tone, rectilinear construction, repetition, and nostalgic semiotics. Color is the most important part of the work. Color is subjective and so how a color feels to me may be different to someone else. With this in mind, my whole conceptual process is an exercise in reducing the place to a minimal composition that can perhaps accurately express an essential subjectivity with color and form.

There are two directions for the work, one looks to traditional elements and the other focuses on new media. I wanted to work with monotype printing for its painterly qualities and because it allows me to work with gesture and mixing color pigment, which represents my subjective connection with art. The process has possibilities for unforeseen variables. Mixing color pigment is interesting because as a painter, you are working toward an idea of a color. CMYK is the subtractive, reflected light color system and the pigments are reflecting the visible light spectrum that isn’t being absorbed. With CMYK, combining more pigments together shifts the color closer to black. With RGB, which is an additive color system, the more color you add, the more you are moving toward white, and black is the absence of color and light. CMYK is for printing onto a white layer such as paper, and RGB is for backlit screens and projected light. One is a traditional material and the other is modern.

My video work is a loop of fabricated photo-imitations being disrupted by artificial glitching. I constructed my images piece by piece from photographs so that there is a hint of photorealism due to the optical perspective. In the western world we have come to a point where our technology is changing how we see the world around us and how we see ourselves. Glitching happens in video and music and almost all digital formats, as an irregularity or an aberration, but this irregularity has given rise to an aestheticized idea of a glitch. Each of my glitches is made of images sequenced together to create a composition. Normally, a glitch is caused by the natural wear of circuits or the corruption of data or any number of mistakes that are part of a failure in technology and so I think glitching is interesting because it is sensorial evidence of the natural world, permeating the virtual reality which constitutes the life of many people.

Rights

© Braxton Charles Duncan, 2016.