Title: Second Destiny Artist: David Katz Medium: Digital Print Size: Height x Width: 13" x 19" Click on IMAGE for larger viewAbout the Artist: David H. Katz is an artist, photographer and writer working in New York City. His artwork has been published in Zeek Web magazine, and exhibited at Makor Gallery, and Diamonds and Oranges Gallery in New York. His work also appears on his website as well as a number of other on-line galleries. He has also written for a wide variety of publications, including The New Statesman, High Times, TANK, The Villager, The Portable Lower East Side, Leg World, Rap Express and Jewish Quarterly. His memoir, The Father Fades, appeared in Transformation, A Journal of Literature, Ideas and the Arts, Spring, 2005. About the Art: Unconscious Illuminations/Altered States My work consists of various categories of altered, collaged or transformed images that live on the narrow border of dreams, and illuminate the uneasy interface between the conscious and the unconscious, the real and the surreal, the world itself and multiple worlds within worlds. Some of the imagery, which often exploits the aesthetic qualities of symmetry, has been likened to stained glass, or termed kaleidoscopic; or, as in the case of the Trance series, characterized as psychedelic. These pieces are indeed meant to be sources of pure ocular pleasure, feasts for the eyes. Others, notably some of the black and white images, employ elements of cognitive disassociation, irony and paradox, isolation, ambiguity, parody, double entendre, malapropism, punning, sarcasm, satire and negative capability; The original material may remain recognizable, and retain, despite a new identity, its original referents. Or various processes may transform the original object into something entirely new, unrecognizable, charged, mysterious, strange. The final effect may vary from the exotically prosaic, to the prosaically exotic; from aesthetically “pleasant” to psychologically disturbing; hopefully both, simultaneously. Hopefully they create a dance of epiphanies, a matrix of insight and illumination, perhaps resembling something once known as “beauty.” Some pieces are simply I strive to create an artwork that stands alone as a visual object, and yet overflows with references and resonations; an object dense-packed with meaning. The images on this website consist of the following, each a series of fifteen available as either a postcard, greeting card, or a 13 x 19 digital print. Domestic Unconscious – a series of images depicting the loneliness and grandeur of shelves, empty kitchens, showrooms, smoke, fences. Fleurs – collages derived from Polaroid images of lilies, irises, roses, and other flowers, with an emphasis on natural and unnatural symmetries. Barriers & Gates – a series of related pieces also based on the infrastructures of retail commerce. Trance – hypnotic pieces derived from random visual “static” generated by a faulty scanner. I also paint large abstract watercolors and have created geometrically constrained black and white pen and ink pattern drawings, derived from grids, which are available to view by appointment, at my studio in Chinatown, New York City, New York. |