St. Mary's Projects in Studio Art:

Chance Hazelton / SMP 2013

Disrupt the Familiar

We live in a world where images flash before our eyes in rapid succession on the television, on our computers, and even when driving down the road looking out a car window. Today’s world has become the opposite of invigorated seeing. Graphics that infiltrate our everyday world include clipart and emojis. These icons are predigested bits of information with the main goal of conveying a message in as little time as possible. Like the male and female gender icons on bathroom doors, we quickly identify the symbol establishing which is female and male but we do not actively pay attention to them. Our world and interpretation of what surrounds us becomes reliant on quantity rather than quality. We have begun to envision our surroundings by breaking down our visual language into a type of graphic modern day hieroglyphs, where the images lose their identity as images and have instead become synonymous with words and phrases.  In my gallery show, I present three images that have been deconstructed and reconstructed in unfamiliar ways in an attempt to remind people to stop speeding through life and finding shortcuts and instead reinvigorate your relationship with the world around you.
By using a variety of multi-media tools, I am able to translate what I see in an ordinary landscape into an unfamiliar form. My artwork captures the phenomena of the flattened image that occurs when I remove color, induce extreme linear perspective, and take the abstraction a step further to include collaged reproductions of the images. The detailed area within each image emphasizes the important role detail plays in understanding and recognizing visual information.