Consumption's Aesthetic

 

 

I created this series after experimenting with analogue photographic techniques. These photos were made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. This technique it's called "the Photogram". I wanted to use everyday objects for this series, mainly packages from thrash food chips and liquor bottles. All the objects in this project have two things in common: first is that they belong to the Colombian landscape of consumer products and second that they are transparent, which makes them perfect to experiment with light and photographic techniques in the dark room. They are also disposable objects, they are seen as thrash, not as artworks or as something to be aesthetically enjoyable. They have the purpose to inform us about the object of consumption and then they are just thrown away, as if they could just magically disappear but no, they accumulate in some ocean. I wanted therefore to present something disposable as art, something that we don't think or care about so much. I wanted to use it's design as something beautiful and I saw it as such.

I used different photographic and artistic methods for this project: I distorted the images by deforming the object andmaking anamorphosis, I made collages with them and started to create abstractions and compositions, I used alternative photographic techniques like the cyanotype. I only made small color and form alterations but I mostly copied them and presented them as they are (following the idea of the Ready Made. Marcel Duchamp coined this term as he presented completely unaltered objects and designated them as art. Another term is "found object" which designates items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made because they already have a non-art function).