Featured Artist Jason Horowitz

Artist Jason Horowitz offers a fascinating portfolio of multi-layered images that seem to alter time and space. Visit his website to see more of his innovative photography.

 

 

I consider myself extremely lucky to have a career doing something I love. Lots of people in the world never find that for themselves.

 

 

I didn’t start out, however, to be a visual artist. I was the kid who was always reading and writing, and I left home for college sure I would have a career as a writer. In fact, I signed up for a photography class just so I would be able to photograph the things I wrote about.

 

 

But then something (magical?) happened. The very first day I picked up a camera in that very first class, I knew I had stumbled on what I was meant to be doing. Looking through a camera allowed me to see the world in a new way. Since then, I’ve been compelled to engage with and interpret the world through photography.

 

 

From the beginning, I had an interest in abstraction and pushing boundaries. I was never satisfied making a picture I felt I had seen before. Why bother? Instead, back in the days of film, I used a panoramic camera to make horizonless black-and-white images, for example, and deconstructed frozen TV dinners in the studio to make colorful painterly abstractions.

 

 

In addition to my ongoing artistic practice, I returned to school for my MFA. I taught art at universities and secondary schools, maintained a commercial photography business, and exhibited my work throughout the United States and internationally.

 

 

I’ve received several grants, including an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. This was especially gratifying since he is one of my heroes. Siskind was a true visual innovator who infused mid-twentieth century photography with a new, more modern and abstract aesthetic. I also had a museum solo exhibit at the American University Museum in Washington, DC.

 

 

What does it mean to be a photographic artist in the era of Photoshop and Instagram? More and more I’ve come to see myself as a meta-photographer. I use digital cameras and technology to investigate the very nature of photography and photographic “seeing” itself.

 

 

Over the past few years, I’ve assembled wall-size, stitched-together digital collages. I use Google Photo Sphere/Street View app and my smartphone camera to create 360° images that playfully bend space and time.

 

 

My current visual investigation into the nature of photography is the @Insta_Stack_Art project, photographic art about contemporary image overload and repetition. Searching #EiffelTower on Instagram, for instance, results in a continuously scrolling page of more than 6.6 million photos. Given that overwhelming visual deluge, why would I want to add another picture to the pile? Is it even possible to shoot something new?

 

 

To look at those questions and more, I’ve been appropriating images from the 95 million daily Instagram uploads and arranging them in x-ray stacks to create art that looks at our relationship to photography and pictures in general.

 

Artist Jason Horowitz invites you to follow him on Instagram, Facebook and the @Insta_Stack_Art project.

 

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