Stephen Golding
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Stephen Golding STATEMENT Generally my work deals with a personal struggle to understand human behaviour. I’m intrigued by the irony of a world steeped in religious belief but lacking in spiritual substance. Often this seems to manifest itself in the depths of human hatred. Expressing abstract concepts such as these in photographic terms is difficult. Photography is inherently a rigid medium lending itself best to documentary purposes. It’s precisely these constraints that led me to begin working in photomontage. Photomontage allowed me the creative freedom of painting while maintaining the characteristics of the photographic image. Over the years, my process has become more complex, but the basic concept remained the same–combining separate picture elements into a new whole. In recent years, I’ve added 3D imaging into the process. In that milieu, 2D objects are subject to the properties of the physical world such as casting and receiving shadows. They are rendered, which is tantamount to photographing them, within their virtual space. Being able to create the components in my montages, rather then sourcing them, has allowed me an infinite level of expression. I’ve never set artificial-creative boundaries in the pursuit of creating a picture. I don’t believe in the purity of one process, or material, over another. Over the years, I’ve made a concerted effort to push my own technological-comfort-zone in an effort to increase my range of expression. Art has simply been a way for me to answer one question, why? BIO I began working in photomontage after experimenting with a process camera in college. I label my work as montage because it’s collage with essentially one material. What began as simply cutting and pasting black-and-white pictures expanded to adding colour in the 80s, digital imaging in the 90s, and 3D imaging in the 00s. Interest in my work led to a book being published by Rockport Publishers titled: Photomontage, A Step by Step to Building Pictures. In that book, I explored combining mechanical and digital methods and included a gallery of notable collage/montage artists. I’ve received various award such as a Regional Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); Regional Fellowship Finalist from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Artist’s Projects: New Forms award from the NEA. Highlights of my exhibition history include: Fogg Art Museum (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts), Southeast Museum of Photography (Daytona Beach, Florida), University of Rhode Island, University of Notre Dame, Princeton University, and Krannert Art Museum (University of Illinois). Collections include: NEA Washington, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, Massachusetts), and Southeast Museum of Photography. My work has been published in books and magazines such as: Wired, Leonardo (MIT Press), Exploring Color Photography ’92 and ‘96 (Focal Press), and The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, Book 2 (Ansel Adams). I live just outside of Boston. My darkroom, which took up two rooms in the 90s (pictures are on my website), has been replaced with a large format printer. While these days I work almost entirely in digital form, I never restrict or limit my process in pursuit of the image I’m trying to make. ARTIST CONTACT [click to email] IMAGES
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Slave Family (from the series “Incidents and Innocence”)