In 1998 I began to photograph objects in my studio in order to rethink formal issues, such as point of view, light, and focal plane, as they related to the content of the perceptually based paintings I was then making using mass produced objects from popular culture. In 2000 I began a new series in which I gridded the photographs into hundreds of squares, and painted one isolated square of photographic information at a time. These paintings combined a hyper-visual condition in which every piece of information was scrutinized equally; a necessarily distorted visual state resulted, due to the impossibility of forming a gestalt from isolated fragments. Leaving some of the squares blank in order to emphasize the grid structure and place focus on the painting as a construction of abstract information, I was interested to determine what percentage of the painting could be left empty and still read as a unified image. An unexpected result was the visual authority, logic and strong rhythmic presence of the unpainted squares. They referred to the wall, the architectural space, while functioning formally within the pictorial space of the painting. The viewer’s negotiation of the terms of the painting became, for me, more compelling than any aesthetic or narrative concern, and I realized that the conditions for the activation of such a negotiation did not require the making of a painting. I tore one of the small photographs in half and taped it to the wall, leaving enough distance so that the space between the halves asserted an abstract presence, while one’s eye/brain was compelled to visually pull the image back into its unified state. I realized that the image need not be my own photograph and that, given my concerns, popular imagery would be inherently richer material to work with.

Immediately following September 11, 2001, I began to project actual shadows onto the covers of familiar magazines, and then re-photograph them, introducing darkness from outside of the field of already known and publicly consumed images. This series, “I Wait For You Every Night”, evokes an overheated, romantic, yet anxious feeling - a corruption of experience and of one’s expectations. This series initiated the idea of “high-jacking” a commercial narrative and transforming information into poetry.

With the fatigued magazine series the intervention is purely subtractive; the ink, clay coating, and cotton fiber of the page are rubbed away. The fatigued page attains a critical, metaphorical state, yet retains its status materially as a page from a magazine produced by the scrutinized culture. The change in material status of the magazine page is accompanied by a shift in its temporal condition; the page that exemplifies the ever-optimistic moment now, as well, memorializes that moment. After I introduce, through excessive manual manipulation, the radical and highly accelerated deterioration, I de-acidify the pages, sew them onto an archival backing, and frame them under UV blocking glass. To the degree of any cherished drawing, they are made archival. The “beat” image is figurative and, prior to fatiguing, conventionally glamorous. It begs associations of an action arrested, of host infected by virus, of a drugged state of mind, a numbed-out society. Magazines are so deeply engrained in western culture that they are experienced essentially as an abstraction. Their familiarity makes them excellent hosts for transformed meaning.

My concerns in my current work, in which I slice magazine pages into units of eighth inch strips allowing images to be intermixed, reversed, stretched, multiplied or run forward and backward simultaneously, are conceptually consistent with the fatigued magazine pieces. The intention of both is to take something familiar and pragmatic and make it strange and metaphorically charged and, while retaining association with the index image, to shift and complicate its material and temporal state. The relationship of the fatigued magazine pieces to their source in popular media imagery is primarily elegiac, while the current, constructed, magazine pieces are more concerned with drawing out the social grotesque.

John Sparagana, 2006