garrie maguire
art practice // inquires into masculinity
AS LARGE AS LIFE
With the advent of digital photography coming to age and over taking analogue in terms of detail and the ability to enlarge prints past what analogue could, we engaged in a lot of discussion about what we could do that was fresh. The Singapore project was photographed on 5x4 inch analogue and the images were scanned to digital and printed life sized. Be able to do this, at a reasonable cost, allowed new sorts of installations past the advertising cut outs. The second project was for my master’s project. This looked amazing, and came with a price attached that was inhibitive.
In the early 2000s digital printing becoming the norm. This allowed artists to make larger prints than analogue printing allowed. I like the cardboard cut outs in stores and played with ideas of how to reconfigure their effect and meaning. So far I have exhibited three of the ideas I have played with.
The first was The Singapore project. This was photographed on 5x4 inch analogue and the images were scanned to digital and printed life sized. They were then stuck to the floor. I was repatriating Australians who had been born in Singapore. This project was paid for by The Esplanade as part of their visual arts programme.
The second was the project for my MA which was displayed hanging from the ceiling of FedSq’s atrium. This was spectacular. As was the cost of staging it. The images were captured the then new Canon 5D2. As the resolution of the camera was not up to the level of detail I wanted. They were made photographing the body in sections, then reassembling in PhotoShop. This distorted the bodies a bit. I corrected so that they were not obvious distortions.
The third, Jump was part of the 2012 Chaochangdi Photo Spring. The photographs were simple enough a jump of a Chinese youth, printed on transparent material and put between buildings in an art precinct. Since then the cost of producing these projects has stopped me making any more.
