Weave

I want to expand the vocabulary of my current work beyond the strips I've been using. I started a couple pieces last week using that method, but it's not the same effect I want. It feels like a crutch at the moment. I was fortunate enough to stumble on David Samuel Stern's Woven Portraits recently, in which he combines two portraits of the same person, woven together. He prints the two portraits on vellum, and physically cuts and weaves the pictures together. The vellum is a beautiful choice for this work, providing a muted color pallet, as well as soft and subtle transitions that allow the grid of the weave to disappear in moments of similar color. I was remind of work I did during my undergrad when I first began to deeply explore digital methods. This is part of one those early pieces:

While thinking about this, I was also looking through my collection of scanned postcards. Oliver Wasow had mentioned the possibility of using older images to convey a sense of time, and I thought there might be some worthwhile options here. I discovered an old postcard from a the Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal, which I had coincidentally just visited a couple weeks ago. This was one of my several attempts to combine one of my photographs with the postcard:

This image is interesting to me, but I think ultimately fails to communicate about time. I don't think the viewer would realize these images were from two different times exactly. I do like the details though:

This is from the center where the two crucifixes overlap. I love the Moire pattern from the scanned postcard. In my second attempt, I decide to weave the postcard image with itself. On an impulse, I expanded the second layer. I did this for about seven layers. This is the result:

I've been researching the Futurists and how they portrayed speed and movement in their work, as well as looking at more current artists like Robert Longo. Repetition is a key element in depicting time and I think in this piece, it works successfully. I feel this piece has an inner energy almost, and ripples.  I'm back to architecture at the moment. A building can preserve through decades, century or even millennia. There's the phrase "if walls could talk," and I think of this architecture as a witness to a long passing of time. I think of time like layers, and I try to visualize what it would look like if layers collapsed. This possibly isn't quite articulated visually yet in my work, but it something I am considering, pondering.