Blum's Photographs Depict Fragmented Reality

Author: Michael Hatch

Artist-in-Residence Liz Blum opened her art show "Composites" Friday evening at the Johnson Gallery. She described the dozen pieces on display as "constructed images in photo-collages and drawings connecting realism to the animated."
The resulting montages of fragmented photo-scenes and witty political collages tease and trick the eye. Her photography elicits second looks traditionally reserved for paintings. From several feet away, a work such as "Sniper" appears to be simply a large-scale photograph of the highway.
All of Blum's photographic works carry this illusion of straightforward photography, but step closer and the incongruities emerge.What was first a simple large photograph of a typical scene becomes a madly shifting and titillating play of photographic fragments whose seams don't always line up.
One patch of snow and earth has a warm yellow saturation while its immediate neighbor exudes a cold blue tone. Branches and clouds stretch naturally from one piece of the collage only to be abruptly fragmented in the next space cell. Spaces that would usually be dismissed as commonplace suddenly become unique.
Each surface and fragment of the composition is an abstracted surface of color worth comparing to its neighbor. These photo-composites make ordinary spaces sacred and puzzling.
What's more, they add mystery and suspicion to otherwise commonplace scenes. The shifting patches of rock, snow and asphalt and the altered horizon lines of "Sniper" morph into dangerous pockets of unknown intent once the title is applied. The act of transformation becomes potentially deadly. Blum creates these images by shooting several rolls of 35mm film to produce about 80 4"x 6" prints of a scene.
She then enlarges and shrinks the images with a color photocopier, fragmenting, cutting, pasting and rearranging moments of a common landscape to produce a composite of that scene from a variety of vantage points and details.
Blum, who is trained as a painter, states that this collaged photo medium "has the physicality of painting. A photograph flattens everything out, but in this process I get to pour over it in detail and deal with issues of form, light, composition, much more like painting."
She continues a similar methodology in her series of composite drawings, the source materials for which are British political cartoons of the 1930s to 1950s. She explained, "Of course in that time you've got World War II, NATO and the U.N. and there are so many cyclical themes that are relevant today."
In "The Stars at Night are Shining Bright," a rain of cartoon bombs blankets the sky, caught in mid-descent, thus creating a surreal night sky. The barren, rocky landscape is all too similar to images of the dry Afghani mountains, creating a disturbing contradiction between the comical components of cartoon illustration and the reality of recent news.
Blum's collection of subtly composed and sometimes unnerving "Composites" will be on display in the Johnson Gallery until April 15.