RICHARD KROEHLING

 

 

We live inside an image flood. Super Bowl Sunday. Millions of selfies. Surveillance footage. Ten-second iPhone clips built for self-promotion. Live streamed mass shootings. Cat videos. We built this tsunami. Now it's remaking us, and we don't yet know how.

My work lives inside that lock-down. The question is simple: how do you make something authentic — something tied to the deepest forms of human expression — and still be seen through this fog of digital control?

I spent years working undercover, a soldier inside the mainstream media machine. Then I left for the margins, looking for ways to subvert an image system that rarely crashes. On the margins are where the freedom is.

I'm restless for new forms of narrative. I have no use for the decorative, the superficial, the pandering. I want bold new forms. I want the viewer to see the world as it actually is and what it could possibly be.

I work with appropriated imagery — historical archives, naive YouTube footage, the depersonalized "trash" imagery that saturates everything. I set that against sophisticated cinematography and ambitious sound design. Authorship and mastery both get called into question. The work moves between motion and stillness, screen and canvas, narrative and lyric.

I usually start with an enabling constraint: a provocative limitation that generates unexpected complexity. Now we stand at a hinge in history — AI's promise and peril, climate collapse, endless war, frozen institutions, grotesque inequality.

What is the business of an artist?

 

 - Richard Kroehling

 

 

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