SENTIMENTALIST II | 2015
People in my life are an amalgamation of every experience that I have ever had. Childhood experiences, sense recognition, current mood, and desires will influence how I engage and view people I meet.
Expectations and dreams also influence how I engage with a given moment in time. This imagery takes a myriad of experiences and expectations and blends all of them together. In the way that many expressionist painters apply layer upon layer of paint to their canvas, this process also grafts layers slowly over time, paying homage to the Photo-Secessionist movement. A single image is created by layering hundreds of digital photographs of a single person taken over time, in order to create a ‘sense’ of that person and how they are in life. Some of the images end up being representational, while others become illusions, more ethereal, a fantasy or dream. This is illustrative of the ways I see and the ways I see all people differently in my life.
Printed on Epson Cold Press Papers in editions of:
7 / 2 AP – 13 x 20 inches
7 / 2 AP – 16 x 24 inches
3 / 1 AP – 42 x 62 inches
“At a time when digitally captured and enhanced photographs can achieve new levels of flawlessness, I find myself increasingly drawn to handmade, inherently flawed images. Work with some complexity and ambiguity, work that was constructed or crafted, work with a very individual voice. Some of the effects that I was most taken with–the lovely, ghostly layering in Matthew Dols’s Sentimentalist series.”
– Vince Aletti, curator notes from “Photography Now,” 2011