COLLAGE

Throughout my art career, I have worked exclusively with pattern and color and have been exploring both as equally powerful elements in the perception of visual images.

 

My earlier photography consisted of heavily collaged interior portraits in middle-class California homes. Done in 4x5 with masks in the enlarger, the technique created large areas of pattern which tended to disrupt the surface and create a 2-D plane. Pattern changed not only the spatial relationships but also changed the sense of the photograph as real. A wide-angle lens further distorted reality and reduced people to the scale and importance of objects. My sense of color was used only to enhance pattern.

 

My recent work is not collaged; there is a much stronger emphasis on the emotional application of color together with a more subtle blending of created and natural pattern.

 

If objects seem to have been given more importance in some of these photographs, it is possibly significant of a misreading. I give objects little intrinsic value other than as formal elements. Their significance is their relational value as signs or symbols and as vehicles for color and pattern. They provide a link, in a structural sense, between past and future periods, (often very specific decades), just as our daily lives are intricately linked in a transitional way to both the past and the future. A patterned curtain or a “Venetian Blind” besides being a barrier or controller of light as well as a kind of decorative element is also a sign of a larger socio-technological structure that is and will continue to be an influencing factor in our lives.

 

My hope through these photographs is to isolate familiar objects and parts of objects to create an artificial color atmosphere and to interject “appropriate” pattern wherever it is not already inherent and, therefore, to change the familiar context, thus changing the sense of reality for the viewer. If this creates an aesthetic distance or objectification then I will have imparted at least some aspect of my own perception of the world.

 

Peter Kloehn, 1989