Description
Anthony Baab – Colin, 2014 is in the following COLLECTIONS:
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Belger Collection
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Nelson Atkins Museum of Art →2023.40.1
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Western Michigan University
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“Colin is part of a series, which started from a photograph of a folded sheet of glossy paper that was printed, re-folded, and re-photographed many times. The “picture within a picture” motif also known as the Droste effect, is what happens when you are in a room surrounded with mirrors or when a video camera records its image through a TV screen. Initially, I was reminded of a of a Magnavox TV commercial from my childhood, wherein a man holding a laptop computer confronts his cloned-image inside the lens of a video camera, which then becomes the picture on a 13” television screen, big screen, and preview display. In my work, the compositional features associated with the Droste effect are used to represent time. At the center of each work is the first photograph.
Lithography is one of the many processes represented in this series—I was especially drawn to the strict and laborious preservation of often quick and spontaneous gestures. For this work I used a toner wash on top of a digitally printed image, which produces organic marks that compliment the straight lines in my photographs. These two elements together produce an image that resembles cracked architecture or a tombstone—a serendipitous result in what I intended to be the last piece in the series. I titled the work Colin, not because it was intended to be a portrait of a person, but rather to assert my own references to an otherwise self-contained image. If what I am doing is a type of portraiture, I would like to represent the likenesses of the pictures, themselves.”
– Anthony Baab –
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