R. Scott Whipkey

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.robertscottwhipkey.com

City / State: Brooklyn, NY

I am interested in what happens to images and symbols when removed from their orientation in the American body politic. My work investigates visual nuances that occur through the decontextualization of such an image: simultaneously neutralizing the image and emphasizing the significance of the event that generated it. And by exploiting the faults of an image in commercial representation, by blurring, fragmenting, cropping, and enlarging an image, I am alienating the symbol from its sedimentation in historical consciousness.

There is an imbued skepticism in the process of making my work. This suspicion is intended to function as an obstruction between the work and the viewer—mirroring how images function as constructed products of global news outlets. Using a kind of Post-Neo-Pop [sic] sensibility, my work draws upon an art–historical dialectic that uses the familiar vernacular of modernism—detournement of image via Pop, attention to construction/materials via Minimalism—to investigate the nature of a symbol’s corporeality through the process and materials I employ in fabrication.