22 SONS

2017

inkjet prints from digital  scans, 18x10cm.

 

 

I started developing the artwork, featured in group show Facsimile at Seventh Gallery, as a very technical exercise in repetition. An image would thread its way between the digital and the physical realms. Starting as a material object, its materials being ink and paper, it would be copied into a faithful digital version of itself, lines of code. A scanner would digitize it and make into a file. The file would be re-converted, via printer, back into ink on paper. Then the print scanned again, and re-printed, and so forth. This process-based premise gained a new dimension once I chose the subject of the image which was going to be put through this cycle.

The photograph is of my great-grandfather’s son, who died young, at 13 years of age, not too long after the photo was taken. For me, he exists as reproduction, for my great-grandfather, he existed as flesh. After his passing, my great-grand-dad had a diary custom made for him, gigantic and more than 700 pages thick, with this photograph printed on every page of it, on the upper left corner.  

Every time he opened his book, his son was the same son for every page. And when he opened the book, he wrote to him. Somewhere in that diary, decades from his son’s death, he writes about how he can’t recall the features of his face anymore, even though the photograph has always been the same for him to see day after day.

 

1) Print #1 2) Print #7 3) Print#14