Thursday, 5 March 2009

_John Stezaker






_I discovered Stezaker about 3 years ago and immediately fell in love with his collage themed work.

John Stezaker collects postcards, movie portraits, stills and lobby cards with an archivist’s zeal. But the way in which they are re-functioned as art is not at all congruent with such an approach. One of the things that makes Stezaker’s practice so intriguing is the extent to which the works more or less follow Conceptual art orthodoxy up to when he makes his ‘cut’, bringing the two images together, after which all other decisions are intuited. The ‘idea’ of the works is straightforward and consistent, and Stezaker has constructed them in much the same way for more than 20 years: two different images are brought together, each destroyed in some important way in order to birth a new one. Yet the logic, or meaning, of the new images remains mysterious.

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