(08-12-2011) 4:51 PDT Little Hollywood, CA. (AP)—, by Donna Anderson Kam, pastel on paper
My friend Donna just finished an artist’s residency at Recology (San Francisco’s city dump and recycling center). Every material she used for her project Beginning at the End had to be sourced at the dump. She waited until a set of pastels turned up and scavenged old dot-matrix printer paper and bits of advertising vinyl. At her opening for this show, I spoke to her about the mystery inherent in her pieces, partly because her models are actors that she directs to play scenes, and partly because she has been experimenting with negative space. She told me that she “over-exposes” her original photos of the actors in Photoshop, so that much of the highlight detail is gone. She then makes the pastel pieces from these more abstracted versions. As a photographer, I was taught that large areas of an image going to paper-white must never be done. It is a technical faux-pas. Donna’s work has opened my eyes to the way the human brain fills in details it cannot see. I might try experimenting with overexposing some of my Polaroids to see what happens when I break the photographic rules.
