MPD?

MPD? Potential diatribes and messed madness within.

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
-Dorothea Lange

            As to that, my photo collages are an attempt to reeducate my audience’s optic nerves, to effect how they process visual information and form connections between various images. I attempt to create a work that sutures the audience, involves them directly in an effort to divine meaning or coherence from a mass assemblage of conflicting and fluid imagery. When an artist is finished with his work, the work continues to progress through its interactions with its viewers. Art is never static, it evolves in the context of both cultural influence and personally divergent viewpoints. If it fails to evolve or be open to interpretation, then it should be considered DOA.

My collages are derived from a variety of sources, either from introspective philosophizing or blind experimentation (usually a catalytic mixture of the two). Nostalgia, in varying degrees, seems to be the central point of my work. Specifically, it’s recognizing the hazy euphoria that time seems to extend to past experiences and seeking to escape from its blinding effects. This applies both to personal experiences I embed within my work and to general views on religious, political, economic and social trends which I find subject to that same nostalgic haze and feel a need to escape from.

As for my photography, I find myself entranced with entropy. By photographing structures aged and derelict, I wish to imply a certain fallacy within the idea of a past golden age. Human kind has always held some high devotion to the ideal of a golden age from where we have slowly fallen into moral dilapidation. I think that’s bullocks. Our nostalgic reverence of a golden age is a desperate fear of change and death (being the two intersect so well). So, through my photography I hope to show our so-called degradation is beautiful, through warm color palettes and fine art treatment of our architectural refuse. Although, perhaps, its’ simply because I like trespassing and being a historical voyeur of past lives. I’m still wondering. 

-James Mazza,

 May 29th, 2008