Justin Caruso: March 2012

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

I Can Be A Frog

Lead Type Letterpress Print (edition of 26)

Amsterdam Postcard

Front

Back

Polymer Plate Letterpress Print

Made in Florence

Orecchiette in tomato zucchini cream sauce

Sundried Tomato and Pepper Salad

Fresh Gnocchi with Sundried Tomato
and Porcini Mushroom Sauce

Pistachio Risotto

Mozzarella in Carrozza

Porcini Mushroom and
Sundried Tomato Risotto

Pane Pizza

Bruschetta with Sundried Tomato Paste

Baked Tomatoes and Eggplant

Pasta Carbonara

Fusilli in Spicy Pepper Cream Sauce

Spinach and Cannelloni Bean Salad

Ditalini in Tomato and Sausage Sauce

Fusilli Bucati Corti with Zucchini and Tomato

The Search For Pictorial Illusions

RC Prints from Zerox Negatives

Street Art is both pictorial and sculptural. It interacts with a three dimensional space but is often a two dimensional image. When we look at the image, for example a photograph of a telephone pasted on a box, the telephone does not exist because it is only a representation of a telephone. Its image exists in a three dimensional space, therefore it has material. However that material is not what the image represents. When I photograph the photograph of the telephone, it becomes even less clear whether the telephone exists or not because I have flatten the third dimension which gave the second dimension materiality and spacial context. And if I were to photograph the photograph closely enough, would you even be able to determine whether the photograph was of another photograph pasted on a box? Or just a really bad photograph taken of an actual telephone. The same relation can be said between art on the street and art in the museum. The photograph in the very center of this arrangement, monogrammed “18” (as I will refer to it) was taken inside the Vatican Museum, Rome. By placing a historical artifact, that is typically viewed within a museum, out of its context of the experience of the museum, I change it’s meaning. I can make the viewer question whether the object is really there or merely a flat image wheat pasted on a surface. Through photography I can create these illusions. The experience we have, either with art on the street or art in the gallery, is dictated by its surroundings. When I photograph the art, I displace their setting and choose to rearrange their meaning. Through the context of this arrangement, one could presume that I found “18” somewhere on the street. This is why “18” can be whatever and wherever one imagines it to be, regardless of where it was when I shot the photograph.