CAFA+ Uncertainty is now available to view here November 2 – December 7, 2024.
Marley Robinson
From a young age, I have been surrounded by both art and art lovers alike. With an artist and design enthusiast for a mum, I was brought up to appreciate the little things in life and their simple characteristics such as the shadows that our houseplants might cast on the wall in the evening light, or the way that little black birds had so perfectly lined themselves up along the power lines. My childhood is greatly remembered by the various arts and crafts projects we so boldly took on; a papier-mâché elk with black and white spots, countless pen drawings (“Bob on His Horse” being a remarkable specimen of disproportionate limbs), and eventually photography.
I tend to lean towards black and whites due to their ability to make the the viewer notice shapes and patterns in the world that often get overlooked when color is involved and distracting to the eye. However, as a contradiction to my strong preference to desaturated images, I sometimes inject vivid colors back into my work digitally with geometric shapes. This experimentation with color was a new and exciting challenge for me which also allowed me to tie in my love for graphic design to my work.
By sucking all of the color out of a photo and then manipulating it further with Photoshop, I’m able to create images that are unique and nonexistent in the natural world, yet still recognizable and somewhat familiar, just captured in a way that makes the viewer think differently about their surroundings.