Brandon Muir is a Vancouver-based artist gaining notice for his creepy digital collage portraits. His process, as he recently shared with the Creator’s Project, involves cutting out old National Geographic and LIFE Magazines, and then reconfiguring those layers using Photoshop and AfterEffects.
I first encountered Muir’s work a long time ago in one of those late night Tumblr scrolls, the kind where you get lost in different hashtag holes. At the time, I wasn’t impressed. I was turned off by the slight cinemagraph-esque movements: the isolating singular looping of an action seemed precious, and a far too easy attempt to recall the still imagery of his source material. I also didn’t get while all the work had the consistent, bottom right hand corner placement of his digital signature. When you’re able to track an artist’s work via hashtags and cross-linking between your Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram, such a signature seems like an antiquated, unnecessary gesture at maintaining a sense of artistic authorship.
But just when I was going to dismiss Muir as one of those populist Tumblr Radar artists that gets by with a ton of re-blog and like approval, I came across these two Nickolas Muray remixes. The Hungarian photographer is best known for his 1930s celebrity portraiture and advertising campaigns, as well as his pioneering three-colour carbro process printing. In openly acknowledging his source material, and gleefully perverting its pristine, saturated quality with surrealist absurdities and body horror-esque retouching, there’s an added nuance that was missing for me in his other work. I still think he should lose the signature, but am curious to see where this series goes.
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