Artwork by Jamie Gannon
Defamiliarized Perspectives and Distributed Attention
Jamie Gannon has been creating works on paper his entire career. Since graduating from the University of Tennessee with a BFA in Printmaking his practice has utilized all the tools available to a modern maker of art including traditional photography, digital photography, intaglio, drawing, painting, and collage. His photographs simultaneously stop time, infuse form, construct memory, and fuel nostalgia. The photographs are both archive and fabrication, index and icon, an open testament to the way a photograph functions in our contemporary world as both a document and a storyteller.
Documenting “place” is an aspect of Gannon's work that is critically important. The precise locations provided with each work add an element of reality that brings into focus the credibility of the original photographs as a recorded archive. Many of the structures found are endangered as time inevitably progresses and their utility wanes. Capturing the subject as completely as possible from all sides is a concerted effort. Presenting the art derived from the original source photos with two sides mirrored gives the viewer an intentionally unfamiliar viewpoint. At the same time the viewer, with prolonged attention, is informed in a way that a single-sided depiction could never provide.
The abstract “new constructions” Gannon creates are an essential extension of the original, documented place captures. Elements from the physical surrounding landscape and details from an overhead map perspective provide inspiration that becomes natural, albeit surprising, visual moments that are based on information from the earth’s collaged reality. Our urban cities, our suburbs, and our farmlands are one giant collage that is never truly separated from the built environment.
Jamie Gannon has been creating works on paper his entire career. Since graduating from the University of Tennessee with a BFA in Printmaking his practice has utilized all the tools available to a modern maker of art including traditional photography, digital photography, intaglio, drawing, painting, and collage. His photographs simultaneously stop time, infuse form, construct memory, and fuel nostalgia. The photographs are both archive and fabrication, index and icon, an open testament to the way a photograph functions in our contemporary world as both a document and a storyteller.
Documenting “place” is an aspect of Gannon's work that is critically important. The precise locations provided with each work add an element of reality that brings into focus the credibility of the original photographs as a recorded archive. Many of the structures found are endangered as time inevitably progresses and their utility wanes. Capturing the subject as completely as possible from all sides is a concerted effort. Presenting the art derived from the original source photos with two sides mirrored gives the viewer an intentionally unfamiliar viewpoint. At the same time the viewer, with prolonged attention, is informed in a way that a single-sided depiction could never provide.
The abstract “new constructions” Gannon creates are an essential extension of the original, documented place captures. Elements from the physical surrounding landscape and details from an overhead map perspective provide inspiration that becomes natural, albeit surprising, visual moments that are based on information from the earth’s collaged reality. Our urban cities, our suburbs, and our farmlands are one giant collage that is never truly separated from the built environment.