This spring I've been watching R. playing with photos she posts on Instagram. Instagram is notorious for being the social media platform deemed to be most detrimental to the mental health of youth, and one could assume to all users. It is a purely image based social media app, and could be summed up as confirming the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words". Users post photos and/or short videos, may include a #hashtag as a means to identify, connect or contextualize the image they are posting. Most likely a key cause of the damage to users' mental health originates from the perception of the images by the followers/viewers of the posters. The follower or viewer perceives the image as relaying some type of truth he or she wishes to be a part of. People, places, objects and events appear 'better' than they otherwise might be experienced by the follower/viewer in his or her own life. However, a key feature of Instagram is the ability to edit the image, to apply filters to make the image into a reality of the poster's own choosing.
R. has her own approach to Instagram. She rarely posts a photo of anything recognizable. Instead she creates abstract images by multiple manipulations of the photograph using both the photo editing options on her iPhone and those available in Instagram, moving the various versions of the photo's truth back and forth between the two applications until finally posting the image -in most cases sans hashtags so that the only hints to what the photo might be must be read by the viewer from the image.
This process is quite similar to the scanning and printing process she and I have been using in the studio with collages and photographs of the paintings, see Good Witches of the Between and A little madness in the Spring. What follows is a small, parallel exploration I have been doing with the Instagram photo-process in mind. Part One begins with an image R. posted to Instagram on June 6, 2017. The original photo, before it was subjected to the Instagram photo-filtering process, is from a painting I did. Here is the image after the filtering process.
I asked R. to print the image onto ten small pieces of Stonehenge paper, approximately 4 1/2 inches x 6 inches [11.25 cm x 15 cm]. I then painted on each print using watercolor, gouache and gum arabic. Here are the ten small paintings of image one, part one.