By Julie Simon
UMB
My work crosses traditional boundaries. Trained in traditional film and video production, I’ve gravitated away from representational reality and toward the abstract and non-linear across many media.
The abstract series of photographs is my latest foray into digitally painting with color and movement. This work uses photography much as an abstract painter would use a paintbrush. Color, shape, and movement are generated photographically and blended digitally. Where a painter might use a variety of brushes and paints to layer the canvas with texture and color, I intentionally move and jerk the camera, capturing frames filled with movement and light. That photographed light, in motion, becomes the raw material for the finished work.
I am much inspired by the ideas of the mid-20th century color field painters, but taking their ideas of form and process and updating them with a 21st century digital twist. I blend elements from many layered photographs focusing on the photographic basics of form—light, texture and color—more than the actual content of the original images(s), to bring out the purity of the medium.
In the past several years, I’ve begun to explore this way of thinking in still photography after many years of shooting figurative art. I’ve become intrigued with blending my two loves: the movement of video and the sense of captured time in still photography. My last several video art pieces have involved slowing down video to the point where we see each frame, deconstructed, as it streaks across the screen. This still photographic body of work turns that idea around. Moving the camera to create streaking, but only capturing one frame.
I’ve been working with the photographic process for more than 30 years—first in television news, and then in corporate media and education. After receiving an M.F.A. in Film/Video Production, I began to exhibit my experimental video, photographic, and interactive work on television and in art galleries/museums and on the web. I’ve won a number of prestigious awards for a wide range of media projects. Currently, I am the director of the B.A. degree in Digital Communication at the University of Baltimore.
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