ABOUT | Perhaps this is a strange obsession, using a camera to paint. Yet light is the easiest of materials to work and a constant source of beauty. It also creates the least amount of mess.
To borrow from my instagram account @mikenyerges, my photographic work reflects the contingencies of time and place, insight and mood. It reflects those moments of chance when the world and experience converge and visually collapse. In the words of Thomas Nail, “The world, body, and brain entrain with one another like interlocking eddies floating down a stream.” My work flows from these contingencies, emerging from a world falling inward. Not a world standing apart. Not a separate, thing-in-itself. But a world inextricably folded into the lived experience, phantoms in the mind’s ephemeral machinery.
I have always felt compelled to express my feelings creatively. I pounded the piano in my teens and early twenties with new-age and atonal compositions and came very close to an undergraduate degree in music composition. I turned these creative energies to painting and paper collage in my later twenties, and to writing.
It has only been in the last 15 years that I have explored the creative potential of photography, particularly with photo-composites and, more recently, with intentional-camera movement, ICM. With photo-composites, I continue my interest in the art of assemblage. With ICM, I create vivid abstract images by wielding a DSLR camera like a painter’s knife. I have also begun experimenting with AI. These and a variety of other techniques provide me the tools to visually break and reshape images of the world in unpredictable and interesting ways.
My work is strongly influenced by surrealism, impressionism and abstract expressionism. What we see shapes how we see. As the Rochester photographic artist Carl Chiarenza writes, “pictures come from pictures.” And in Seduction of the Minotaur, Anaïs Nin reminds us, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Or in the words of William Blake, “As a man is, So he Sees.” Art is a mirror.
I organize my work here to explore the emotional and rhythmic similarities of disparate subjects. In the words of Woolly—a character in Amor Towles’ Lincoln Highway—when describing his collection of personal keepsakes, the site is not “a collection of different versions of the same thing. It’s a collection of the same version of different things.” Ultimately, my work is the finely edged present laid against the vastness of time.
I started exhibiting my photographic work in local and regional galleries in 2019. For a listing, see Exhibits.
My galleries are powered by | Modula |
My theme is by | Divi by Elegant Themes |
My site runs on | WordPress | at | GreenGeeks |