Jerimiah Chechik
Artist’s Statement
I inhabit a median zone that lies between truth and fiction, where I explore ways of creation that deepen the emotional reaction to the work using faded memory, cellular intelligence, exploration, and shifting scientific systems. By subverting the source(s) of the image itself, by manipulating, sculpting and exploring the form and familiarity of the image - pushing the image toward a recognizable reality, the result seems similar but not akin to our perceived view of what feels real in this Uncanny Valley.
John Szarkowski describes photography as "a system of visual editing.” "At bottom..." he continues, "it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's own cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite." Moving beyond photography, applied to a more expansive visual universe of the mind, it is as much about what is left out of the boundaries of the frame. Fragmentations, gaps, contradistinctive experiences lie at the heart of the postmodern. Micheal Rush in his book New Media in Late 20th Century Art notes: "In painting or sculpture, it is the concepts and uses of materials that change in the art. With technology-based art, the medium itself radically changes when the technology changes. The excitement...in being able to capture movement...is now replaced by an enthusiasm for altering reality, for making the real illusory."
Rush captures the very fuel that powers the contemporary digital artist. We are captivated by process, by mathematics, by machine influences and by metaverses. Art becoming non-fungible as reality becomes fungible. My work is intended to transport the viewer through a kind of false memory, a familiarity to a different time and place, where everything feels somewhat familiar, real and emotional.
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
*Art on cover: Lippershay 1608 Study 899, 2022