ArtistLA and M Hale Gallery

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Art from the Archives

Digital Realism and VMA

Over the past six years, I became a visual artist, somewhat by chance. I accidentally taught myself how to deconstruct and reconstruct digital images, eventually building on that experience to reimagine vintage photos from black and white to color, essentially bringing them to life. I especially like re-imagining real photo postcard (RPPC) street scenes. As public spaces they offer rich cultural information. I called this artform: Digital Realism.

I'm a third year PhD student at UCLA doing research that is situated in visual methods and ways of seeing. My research occurs at the boundary of Information Studies and Visual Anthropology. I endeavor to know how visual imagery and information is processed. As research material, vintage photographs convey numerous aspects of social memories and popular culture. Visual cognition is a form of information gathering. Visual cognition is more direct, economical, and instantaneous than reading, which involves the coding and decoding of words and language. There are many things we would rather see than read about.

Before coming to UCLA, I operated an art gallery in Palm Springs featuring my work, which is where this artform was born. I look for memorable images to begin with, and I apply a process to them that I call the visual method of abstraction (VMA). VMA is based upon the theory that what we see in our minds' eye is a holistic fusion of what we know, what we believe and what we imagine. In that sense, this artform is visual ethnography, visual memories bound up with cultural stories; and incredible images from the past.

Imagine that...


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