sean wrenn ∞ (aka “scrapworm”)
My studio process focuses on transforming recorded moments into immersive photomontage landscapes though diligent creative practices including: daily photographic shooting, printing, color copying, layout, and hand assembling of image bits via a wet décollage technique (with acrylic medium on various substrates). My hand assembled photomontages respond to (and draw visual information from) the unfolding conversations of urban architectures. The intricate torn patterns of my photomontage planes mimic decaying street posters using rich original photographic content, color patterning, and expanding visual fields to craft optical experience with striking visual symbolisms. As in my interdisciplinary installation projects, the photomontage planes suggest existence as “artifact” from an implied “near-future.” Therefore, the aesthetic experience references the geological strata of deep history within our accelerated contemporary senses of past/present/future – as influenced by imaging technologies and digital proliferation.

I am intrigued by the progression of photographic technologies and cognitive and material “sequencings of experience.” These philosophic interests guide my process of creating time/space-layered photomontages, artist’s books, video, installations and interactive performance events. Culture itself is an ever-generative process. Because culture is tied to the violence it can produce, the layered photographic moments ‘destroyed’ transmute the precious debris of history into visually dynamic, associative understandings of human “nature” (understandings, passions, and morals) —visually re-experienced and critically deconstructed (within Metropolitan “Creative Destruction”).

I have been focused on current color techniques for over 2 years, the process having emerged from my former bodies of work using monochromatic copies and accumulated archives (2005-2006). My 2007-2009 installations included large-scale black and white montages with graphic layers, but now I am paying increased attention to internal architectures and use of varied scale (for eye-movement and ground-shifting)-- creating patterns in color and perspective to evoke planes that appear to recede and come forward with engaging motion and rich visual symbolisms on a body related scale.