Canadian Artist Re-invents Photomontage for the Digital Age
Published April 4th, 2009
Photomontage is an artistic practice that artists have used since the late 1800’s. Today, digital techniques allow the artist greater freedom to experiment by greatly reducing traditional darkroom time, allowing for a precise level of image control and offering exciting visual effects previously unachievable.
Canadian Artist, Ellen Scobie, has developed her own process of “visual digital sampling”. Just as some musicians select sounds, beats and rhythms from various sources, a technique known as “sampling”, to create a new piece of music, Scobie samples photographs to create her artwork.
Even though Scobie is using innovative digital techniques, her artwork is rooted in the traditional process of fine art lithography, where the image is built up by combining successive layers of ink pigment. She starts by taking digital photographs of the landscape and creating scans of found ephemera. She then samples the colours and textures in this digital material, choosing from a “palette of pixels” to create her new composition. When the image is complete, it is printed by a high resolution inkjet printer. Scobie elaborates, “I come from a printmaking tradition and I am using photography to create works of art that read like paintings. It’s a new art form that relies on the old art forms for its existence.”
Scobie will be exhibiting a selection of her work in a show entitled, “Memory Ambushed: The Ambiguity of Feeling”. The artwork aims to communicate with viewers through the shared experience of familiar feelings. Scobie offers this explanation: “My art is about conveying emotion. Emotion as conjured up by memory, lived or dreamed, consciously experienced or not. Our singular lives are made up of individual events yet bound by a commonality of feeling. In the community of strangers in which we often find ourselves living, I aim to establish a connection with others through the human capacity to express emotion. I’m showing this artwork in the hopes that it will resonate with you and unite us in the shared experience of living.”
BIOGRAPHY
Ellen Scobie was born and raised on Vancouver Island. She attained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History from the University of Manitoba where further studies in lithography introduced her to the process of fine art printmaking. She continued her art studies at the historic London College of Printing, England. Ellen has experimented with a wide variety of media and techniques all of which have shaped her current artistic practice of digital photomontage.
“Memory Ambushed: The Ambiguity of Feeling” is showing at the Massey Theatre’s Plaskett Gallery, 735 Eighth Avenue, New Westminster, BC, Canada from February 25 – April 20, 2009. The gallery is open Mon-Fri, 9-6 and during theatre performances.
Contact: Ellen Scobie
Phone: 604.436.4176
www.verosimile.com
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