It Always Happens This Way (collaboration with writer Katrina Prow); letterpress, pigment prints; 2015

Every time a photograph is taken, there’s an acknowledgement of loss—the scene, the environment, the subject, the file, & even the change that takes place immediately after the photographer presses down the shutter button—everything breaks down. Let are memories & traces, the stories we tell repeatedly to ourselves, only able to clue in others on fragments of our experience. Inspired by Emily Dickinson—for her words, her envelope poems (poetry written on scraps of paper, recipes, or envelopes), & how she pressed & preserved nature in various indexing formats—I create large-scale photographic artworks for the viewer to engage in the details of objects situated within a narrative experience. Being an artist and a poet, I also strive to create work that gives a visual presentation to words. My photographs are described as unsettling, with undertones of sex & violence, & often produced by pressing objects into a scanner. Letterpress gives this same experience on a deeper physical level, as whether I’m pressing type into a surface (paper, fabric, or other), or making objects type-high so they can also be pressed, it is a violent action: for example hearing the flowers crush to nothing as the press is in motion, with fragments of their destroyed fragility leaving traces. Beauty comes out of destruction.

For the piece It Always Happens This Way, I push the limits of materials & question human involvement in mechanical methods of reproduction such as photography & letterpress. The bottom layer—two pigment prints of photographs I created—were pulled through the proofing press repeatedly, with wood type spelling out XO, inked with oil-based letterpress inks in metallic silver, fluorescent blue, & black. In the violent act of pushing the folded paper through the press multiple times, the surface tears & wrinkles, fighting back under the pressure. By revealing to the viewer only a selected part of the original photography & layering the ink on thick to cover the rest, I’m piecing my own memory together & creating a narrative for the viewer through the writing layered on the top in transparent pigment prints. The fiction presented on the top layer is by Katrina Prow, a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Texas Tech University, from Long Beach, California. This writing pushes the viewer into the scene, the aura, & the moment recreated in all the layers present.

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This piece was on exhibition as part of the group show "INK THIS: Curated Prints," in the South Gallery of Landmark Arts (for more photographs & information of this exhibition, click here).

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Featured in The Bowerbird, in a FFAT review by Vincent Meyers

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For more information & to contact Katrina Prow, please visit her website at http://www.katrinaprow.com