Almost all of my current work utilizes cut-up photographs in some way. Sometimes the reassembly is more abstract than others. So naturally, I'm really in love with the Haunted Mirror series of collages by Allison Diaz. She uses celebrity portraits from the 60's and 70's to simulate the neurological disorder Prosopagnosia, or "face blindness" to effectively render them unrecognizable.
Found via TodayAndTomorrow
While Peter Alexander is best known for his beautiful resin sculptures, I have always been much more attracted to three specific series of LA-centric paintings and monoprints he created between 1988 and 1995. I think LAX, Riots, and City Nights are most captivating in the way they strip away everything except the artificial light sources.
I'm a sucker for images/drawings of Don Quixote (I even had Picasso's version on my bed sheets as a kid). It might be because the Man of La Mancha's delusions of grandeur naturally suggest a nice sketchy, abstract illustration style. Or maybe I just like the often elongated forms that exaggerate the skinny Quixote and his horse Rocinante. Either way, I love these illustrations by Roberto Paez from his 1969 book.
images via butdoesitfloat
It's hard to find much information about Richard Cook, but I really like his mixed media series Things Taking Shape. Cook complicates the photographic subject with bold, contrasting, intrusive objects that make you question weather the simple shapes are conceptually subtractions or additions.
At first, Phil Ashcroft's paintings appear as sharp, abstract works. But look at them a little longer and you'll clearly see a cartoon or comic book style with elements of graffiti emerge. On his site, Ashcroft admits to a heavy abstract expressionist influence to which he incorporates other varied visual styles like British landscape, Japanese woodcuts and graphic street art to "generate a crossover between space, object and environment".
20 objects of enameled sterling silver, part of Ron Gilad's Spaces etc./An exercise in utility series. Gilad's latest body of work "encompasses objects that question our relationship with the architectural environments that define our immediate surroundings".
Incredible work by Andy Denzler. Understandably, these much blogged about paintings seem to illicit an immediate comparison to Gerhard Richter and damaged videotape. I'll give that to you on a purely visual basis, but there is an important difference in the intention of the process. Conceptually, Denzler's figures emerge from "nothing" or the abstract, while Richter's process deconstructs realism by removing you a step or two from the original. Whether or not they both end up in the same thematic place of memory/perception is a fun argument. I'll buy the drinks.
I've been seeing a few Patrick Winfield polaroid composites popping up around lately in some interesting places. Clearly his nature/landscape/flower images are most popular, but I've always liked his more abstract composites like these, which almost approach a crossover to his collage work.
A few pieces from the intriguing body of work by Janet Laurence. She often explores the relationship of architecture to the natural world and uses complex alchemical techniques to transfer translucent images and mediums to glass and metal.
I can't stop looking at the amazing mixed media work from Tsilli Pines.
Quoted from her site: "This series is about the topography of money in human consciousness, the constant parade of numbers in everyday life. The figures are at once imaginary and very real. I’m interested in the power numbers have in our lives, and how much they dictate, both psychologically and actually.
These pieces were made with pigment, vintage paper and cotton thread on rice paper. The color palette is intentionally restricted to red and black: the colors of accounting. The work details the extent to which I think about finances, and uses the historically feminine crafts of sewing, collage and rubber stamping to penetrate and explore the traditionally masculine realm of business in our lives."