COMPOSITE HYBRIDS
These photomontages have been cut and pasted together into assemblages forming hybrid, creature-like beings. Visually chaotic, they are frozen in a moment in time. Body parts are disconnected and rearranged with other images from both virtual and real worlds. They hover in a fragmented frame, of subtle overlapping sharp shapes and lines. The cuts are completely visible, and their method of creation is no secret. Emerging from my imagination and manifesting itself in negative form, these composites are an ongoing part of my studio practice. Using digitally printed photographic negatives, this project explores speculative narratives of a technologically mediated future where human bodies have integrated with other living and non-living matter.
Katarina Marinic
Katarina Marinic is a photo-based artist residing in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her personal work addresses the ability of digital imaging processes to provide an open-ended, speculative frame to the reinvention of the human body in today’s technologically mediated world. She is interested in how contemporary digital imaging practices manipulate and alter images, how they represent the gendered body, and how they exist and travel across vast information networks. She works with appropriated and original photographs, 3D computer generated imagery, 2D & 3D animations, installation, and digital projection. Her practice is rooted in the constructed and manipulated image, where the body becomes a place where we can begin to think through and understand the implications of technology in our daily lives. As someone who both creates and consumes images, she looks at technology as not just a tool, but as a process of investigation into her own changing subjectivity. She utilizes the tools of image manipulation to open up a world of possibilities, creating alternative representations of the human body that are presented in both digital and material/physical forms. She draws inspiration from science fiction stories, where bodily boundaries become extended through technology. She creates hybrid bodies that are monstrous and creature-like, indeterminate forms that stretch the boundary between human and machine. Her work asks if there is a transformative potential that can challenge hierarchical power structures, that frames the world in a more inclusive and heterogeneous way. Constructed at the computer screen, the digital body and its infinite and malleable representations become a means to explore fictional realities and the ever-shifting boundary between the real and virtual.