UNTITLED (NO PLACE) 2015—2017
These prints are created by merging analog and digital image-making processes. I start with handing painting 16mm film. This is not film that already has images on it, but rather old 16mm films that I have submerged in bleach in order to remove the images so that I may work with the acetate itself. After cleaning the film and drying it, I will lay out a long piece of the film reel -- usually about 10-15 feet at a time -- on the ground (atop butcher paper) and begin painting it. Typically this starts with me making large sweeping marks on the film, not considering the individual frames so much as how the brush stokes move across the entire film strip. Once this is complete, and dry, I will go back into the paint and scratch some of it away, add more in other places, and just generally build up the painted surface as I would in any other kind of painting. Once this is complete, I will scan each individual frame of the film so that I can work with it on the computer. These are very high resolution scans that allow me to resize, crop, and visually alter the frames. I will then search through the frames to find ones in which some kind of landscapes seems to be emerging. Once I have this, I will then move into my large database of digital landscapes photographs that I've taken all around the world. I may pull the sky from Hawaii, the ground from Ireland, some flowers from California, and so on. Through this process I attempt to create places that do not exist -- No Place -- and yet also sort of do. This series of images is about imagining these otherworldly spaces, as well as continuing my longterm exploration of the relationship between photography and painting.
”Brilliantly vivid, painterly, abstracted landscapes by Jules Rosskam present potential for alternate social structures not in the future, but the present American landscape…Pure, exuberant color is interrupted only by occasional imagery to suggest the wide-open sky of the American West. Rosskam both pictures a utopian ideal in the present and denies its existence as “No Place.””
—Anastasia Tinari, Anastasia Tinari Projects
Most of the prints above are for sale. To see sizes and pricing, click on the thumbnail image.
Commissions are also available in this series.