ANDY MATTERN // Standard Size
Standard Size depicts the surfaces of isolated boxes of photographic paper with their text and images physically removed or redacted. Distracted by the dramatic imagery and prominent branding design on boxes of analog and digital photo paper in my studio, I decided to purge this information from my immediate view. So I cut or sanded off the example pictures on the front of the boxes and covered up all the logos and text with colored masking tape. The result is a new surface that seems both familiar and inexplicable, which I photographed straight- on and then printed at life-size. Repeating this ritual with many different photo paper boxes, a collection of related formal compositions has emerged that resists the corporate example of art’s potential as it reconsiders the embedded meaning and creative opportunities held in the materials themselves.
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