STATEMENT: Quarry 2: Illinois Forest 1, Remade 10.1

In all my Quarries pieces, an original image is treated as a "quarry" from which a group of art works are "mined." For the Remades of Quarries, I divide the original image into a grid, and then rearrange the cells of the grid into an intentional pattern. This rearrangement serves as the smaller panel of a diptych. In the larger panel the rearrangement is repeated nine times, but with the cells almost always reduced in resolution. A controlled use of random numbers determines which reduced resolution version of each cell is used in each of the nine repetitions, and my hope is that the larger panel displays a mix of artistic intentionality and openness to the randomness of the universe. Despite the size differences, I consider each panel of equal importance. It is preferred that they be hung together, but one can also be hung alone.

This work, one of the earliest of the Remades, is the first in which I rearranged the original into a highly artificial pattern, in this case a kind of tree shape, which seemed appropriate to the original image of forest and sky. I have also rearranged an image of Times Square into bands of similar colors, thinking about the way that someone might arrange books solely by color, and rearranged the components of other images to form circles and curves. I hope there is a small bit of humor in these "artificials," a joke on the hubris of artistic intentionality, on our desires to remake the world into more ideal, but also inevitably, more arbitrary, patterns. The resolution reductions and randomness in the large panel, best explored through detailed comparisons of each repetition with the others, further qualifies the original hubris.

Fred Camper
Chicago, Illinois
February 14, 2011.