OmahaNebraska

This series was created as a final exam for one of my art/design classes. We were each assigned an artist and then wrote a 15 minute presentation on them, then followed that with a work(s) in reaction to the assigned artist. Arturo Herrera, my assigned artist, is a modernist mixed media artist who believes in "contaminating" his abstract forms and shapes with recognizable imagery borrowed from pop culture. I immediately made connections with photography - as the camera can become a tool for abstraction, but often the individual elements are still photographically rendered as recognizable. For my "reaction" work I making a number of photographs that explore photography and abstraction while still using large enough spaces that certain important elements are still recognizable, thus "contaminating" the image similar to Herrera. When it came time to choose locations I struggled, at first considering industrial complexes or even suburban housing tracts. I remembered that nestled in my childhood home of south Omaha there was a small mall that had long ago withered and died with a three story parking garage - and that an abandoned parking garage would give me the benefit of a lot of painted, geometric shapes and lines. Then I thought about lighting and came to an obvious conclusion to shoot at night, as there would be many small contrast lights sprinkled around the place, as well as illumination from passing cars. I decided to use this series in black and white to maximize the graphic effect and to help add another layer to counteract the realism of the doors, windows, bricks, parking stalls, etc. The images are shown in varying states of rotation, some completely inverted vertically or horizontally. This series is meant to be viewed as a group. Each image will be printed in varying sizes from 8x8 inches to 24x24 inches and installed in a mosaic of sorts.