Statement

I’ll buy film and paper before new shoes. I’m constantly driven to create. It makes no difference whether I’m smearing toxic chemicals over paper, or manipulating images and type by pushing pixels around on a computer. The goal of my work has always been to expose that which has been overlooked –– that which lies beneath, behind and around the corner. I want others to share the same profound emotion I experience when two seemingly incongurent objects are juxtaposed in just the right way.

Photography, film/video, and graphics are the media to which I’m most attracted. They seem to be amicable companions, and each one shares certain inherent qualities of the other. Their qualities are so in accord that I have no difficulty moving from one to the other with ease. I can wake up in the morning and take a back-alley photo of a rusted lamp fixture over a door. Then, I can go back to the studio, perform some digital manipulation on the same image, create a silk-screen from a drop-out printed on transparency film, and print fifty posters to post up all over the alley where I took the original photo. In the afternoon, I may go to the beach to videotape myself walking a circle into the sand for several hours for the next installment of my Inside/Out series, a body of film/video work exploring landscape through meditation, endurance and hopeless labor.
 

– Justin Colt Beckman