Jesse Farber

first title: rm[±‡L]t second title: sÍÎhÍÎtÍÎpÍÎr
Despite their photographic precision, depicting tangible objects in physical spaces, my inkjet prints are in fact carefully crafted montages of scanned images, digitally composed from hundreds of Photoshop layers. For the viewer, questions immediately arise: what is this, and how was it made? By simultaneously maximizing photographic realism, while undermining it with signs of its own artificiality, this work precipitates critical reflection on the photograph’s problematic relationship with truth in the digital age. The works I’m including here are from the last year, part of a current series of theatrically staged assemblage objects. I’ve included a detail of one of the prints in order to give a better sense of how these read in person, at full scale, where the texture gradients of magnified halftone dots are more noticeable. There is a kind of paradoxical inversion of distance in these images: the further away things are in the pictorial space, the more they have been magnified. What appears distant and unclear is closest, and the closer objects get, the more their surfaces retreat.