‘Collective Unconscious: Addenda’ is a work of constructed photography. The images in this piece have a familiar quality, bringing to mind the collages covering many of our refrigerator doors. This collage, however, has grown and exploded. It contains images dredged up from a modern collective unconscious rather than the details of an individual family’s life.

The images are strewn over the wall in an apparently haphazard manner, though on closer examination the arrangement has an inner logic. Photographic pictograms, they form a text legible to a transliterate, image-saturated society, possibly evoking memories you didn’t know you had. Are these images from the past or in the future? Do they represent a fond memory or a suppressed nightmare? (Even harsh realities can take on a warm glow through the honey-colored prism of nostalgia.)

The images themselves portray created scenarios, referencing aspects of contemporary life in abstracted form. Images of mass-produced housing, migrant populations, and economic distress are juxtaposed with iconic styrofoam cups, cupcakes and doughnuts. Cast in beeswax and porcelain, these ‘stand-ins’ have a soft, luminous quality at odds with the referents themselves.

A beeswax coating gives the pictures a golden glow and mild scent of honey. The beeswax slightly obscures and yellows the image, making it somewhat unavailable and hard to place in time and space. The white border references early ‘snapshot’ photography, in which ‘snapshot’ equals spontaneity as well as memory.

Medium: Encaustic Photographs on Panels     Dimensions: 8′ x 10′     Date: 2014