Reworked Photoshop Collage

Continuing to play with some of the ideas and visual imagery of the work of Brian Dettmer, the artist I highlighted last week who works largely with “book dissection”, I’ve reworked one of my collages from last week. I took my original Photoshop collage:

Then, I cut a rectangular section from the bottom right corner, rotated it to make it a horizontal rectangle, and enlarged it. Then I copied the original image and pasted it onto the cropped section, which was now bigger, serving as the background and allowing me to shift the face to the center of the image and to have a larger background area on which to transpose my scanned book pages. Then, I scanned in several pages from a book which I had cut the center parts out of, in an uneven, fluctuating pattern. I positioned the words around the face, as if the face were emerging from a book, or as if to evoke a kind of dream-like quality of words swirling chaotically, jumbled as the mind tries to sort through them and make sense of them. I wanted to heighten the play on the visual quality of words as well as their literal meanings, and play with the sort of overwhelming cacophony of word and image, of layers of visual interest and meaning characteristic of Dittmer’s work. Here is the final product I came up with:

Also, here is the black and white version, which has a slightly different feel or effect, it seems to me: