MASHUP & REMIXES
recent photographs by KATHLEEN DAY-COEN
jerry on bathers and scribe on woman as chair c-prints 32x32 2004
PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD
Observe three paintings carefully.
Mix them well in your head.
—Yoko Ono, 1962 spring, from Grapefruit
Kathleen Day-Coen's artistic tools include a Hasselblad camera, an assortment of new and vintage slide projectors, and a collection of 7,000 slides of her own photographs, artworks in museum collections, pictures shot out of books, and one slide found in an old projector she bought at a garage sale. Employing a conceptual mix of feminism, Jungian psychology, postmodern appropriation, cultural anthropology, physics, and serendipity, Day-Coen creates new images by merging two visual sources—sometimes her own straight photography, often iconic images sampled from centuries of art history, sometimes cosmological charts or the traces of subatomic particles. In Mashups and Remixes, the first full showing of this body of Day-Coen's work, Jackson Pollock meets polarized light; a cave painting meets Michelangelo; Mount Olympus meets a hotel escalator; Chartres Cathedral meets a uranium reaction; tourists meet an Aristotelian universe. Centuries connect. Space collapses. Icons battle or make peace or stare at each other across time. Images fuse to create something entirely new, elusive, charged, full of rhyme and rhythm.
Borrowing musical concepts as metaphors for Day-Coen's new combos, this exhibition suggests that her technique is a visual relative of the pop music forms of the mashup and remix. A child of digital technology and mixing software, the mashup is a new song created from the lyrical line of an existing song mixed over the instrumental line of another tune, often of a completely different musical genre. Mashups are created by other artists than those who created the original recordings. The most famous mashup is DJ Danger Mouse's 2003 mix of Jay-Z's The Black Album with the Beatles' White Album to create The Grey Album. (It was distributed briefly until EMI, which holds publishing rights for the Beatles' album, banned its distribution; yet it remains available online.) Remixes have long been around in dance versions of already released songs. With the rise of hip-hop and DJ culture, the remix has become a major musical form, as sampling and mixing of original songs create fresh versions and often a thoroughly new sound. References to the original can be skeletal or full-bodied.
Unlike the digital remixing of songs, Day-Coen employs a laborious, old fashioned way of merging images. Rather than using digital images—either digital photos or scans of photograhic prints or images found on the Web—and mixing them with computer software, a practice employed by many artists, she projects two overlapping slide images onto a wall. After manipulating them to find the right mix, she photographs this coupling. Long exposures take advantage of serendipity. Results are only discovered in the printing process (Day-Coen remains a film-based photographer), when areas of shadow, light, and color can emerge in surprising ways from the projected images.
Day-Coen chooses source imagery very deliberately, departing from many artists who collage or appropriate materials with an eye for surreal juxtapositions or random associations. Her hunt for satisfying couplets is motivated by a search for deep connections, both cultural and spiritual. Playfulness operates in and around her images, but irony is rarely her mode of address.
In her early photographs, Kathleen Day-Coen explored iconic affinities and contrasts, a direction motivated by long conversations with her mother, who studied world cultures and art history in both feminist and Jungian veins, as well as physics and philosophy. To a large degree, those photographs are collaborative projects between mother and daughter, who talked and looked at projections as Day-Coen worked in her studio. Through her gutsy deconstructing and reassembling of art historical canons, Day-Coen takes on the weight of human history and our relentless need for image-making. In recent work, the photographer roams more freely in her sources, making greater use of contemporary culture in such pictures as an ornate hotel chandelier, the comic book Yummy Fur, a rodeo cowboy, and her own self-portrait, all of these layered with other images.
Like the popular music forms of the mashup and remix, Kathleen Day-Coen's photographs sample existing culture, selecting and recombining images from ancient and contemporary sources like found objects. Her mergings create hauntingly beautiful, glowing tableaux that shimmer somewhere between opening up new meanings and dissolving into an illegibility of pure form and color.—Colleen Sheehy, 2005