RICHARD KROEHLING

 

 

We live in a world inundated by an imagery riot. We are left with spectacles like Super Bowl Sunday, staggering millions of “selfies”, surveillance videos, 10-second self-promotion I phone clips, streaming of mass murder shootings, and sweet cat moments. The image-driven tsunami is crashing over us with a new reality all its own. We have made this feverish image-world and now it is re-making us in ways that are not yet clear. My work acknowledges this troubling image lock-down and asks how does one make authentic and novel work tied to the deepest form of human expression and still be seen in this blinding fog of digital control. After some years  working undercover as a soldier in the mainstream media machine, I moved to work on the margins and began to look for ways to subvert the image system that rarely crashes.   It is a natural place of enormous creative freedom and possibilities. I find myself restlessly looking to find new forms of narrative expression and story-telling. I hate the merely decorative, the superficial, and pandering to audience's expectations. I am looking to find new bold forms. I want the viewer see the current real conditions of the world. I sometimes utilize appropriated imagery, historical archival, or naive You Tube videos (the powerful depersonalized “trash” imagery of the world) playing with the fetishism of image quality and contrasting it with sophisticated cinematography, ambitious sound design, calling into question notions of authorship and technical mastery.   The starting point for me is finding an “enabling constraint”,  a provocative limitation that can yield enormous complexity and unexpected new forms to emerge. Now we stand on the hinge of history and a decaying world with the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, the reality of climatic collapse, endless war,  frozen political institutions and grotesque inequality…what is the business of an artist? 

 

 - Richard Kroehling

 

 

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